Wildfires have long been considered as a dynamic ecological factor and an effective agricultural and landscape management tool, but more recently they are increasingly seen as a hazard, which has motivated governments to develop spatio-temporal datasets and to produce risk and prognostic maps. A key factor in this respect is to study the spatial and temporal distribution of wildfires and understand its relationships with the surrounding socio-economic, environmental and climatological factors.
In recent years, innovative algorithms and methodologies have been developed for the analysis of spatially distributed natural hazards and ongoing phenomena such as wildfires. Considering the fast growing availability of high quality digital geo-referenced databases, it is important to develop and promote methods and new tools capable of easily take them into account, especially for large scale analysis. Convert the available datasets into meaningful and valuable information is the new challenge.
This session will bring together wildfire hazard scientists and researchers of various geo-disciplines, economists, managers and people responsible for territorial and urban defense and planning policies. The goal is to improve the understanding of the fire regime and discuss new technologies, methods and strategies to mitigate the disastrous effects of wildfires.
In this context, this session will examine empirical studies, new and innovative technologies, theories, models and strategies for wildfire research, especially to identify and characterize the patterns of spatial and temporal variability of wildfires.

Research topics include, but are not limited to:
• pre- and post-fire assessment: fire incidence mapping and variability, fire severity and damage, including fire-planning and risk management
• development of methodology, based on expert knowledge or data driven, for the recognition, modelling and prediction of structured patterns in wildfires
• fire spread models, ranging from case studies to long-term climatological assessments
• long-term trend patterns: relation between wildfires and global changes (e.g., climate, land use/land cover, socioeconomic)
• fire impacts on the environment, in particular on the atmosphere, human health and natural/anthropogenic environment
• post-fire vegetation recovery and vegetation phenology

Both Oral and Poster presentations are very much encouraged, as we plan to have both lively oral and poster sessions.

Fire is an essential feature of terrestrial ecosystems and an important component of the Earth system. Climate, vegetation characteristics, and human activity regulate fire occurrence and spread, but fires also feedback to them in multiple ways. The mechanisms of interactions between fire, land, atmosphere, and society are complicated and remain poorly understood quantitatively. This session welcomes contributions on all aspects of links between fire, biosphere, climate, and humans to share recent advances and foster interdisciplinary discussions. We encourage all abstracts that explore the role of fire in the Earth system at any temporal and spatial scale using modeling, field and laboratory observations, and/or remote sensing, with an emphasis on studies that advance our understanding on (1) impacts of fire on weather, climate, and atmospheric chemistry, (2) interactions between fire, biogeochemical cycles, land water and energy budgets, and vegetation composition and structure, (3) influence of humans on fire and vice versa (e.g., impact of fire on air and water quality, human health, and economy), (4) fire characteristics (e.g. fire duration, emission factor, emission height, smoke transport), (5) spatial and temporal changes of fires in the past, present, and future, (6) fire products and models, and their validation and error/bias assessment, and (7) analytical tools designed to enhance situational awareness among fire practitioners and early warning systems, addressing specific needs of operational fire behavior modeling.

According to the Global Wildfire Information System, every year approximately 350 million hectares of land are affected by wildfires. This global phenomenon is responsible for substantial environmental, social and economic losses, which together with land abandonment, droughts, absence of appropriate land management and urban development planning, are expected to aggravate land degradation. In addition, wildfires are becoming a persistent threat, since the fire risk is expected to increase in a context of a warmer and drier climate.
This increased land degradation as a consequence of wildfires has also been highlighted in the latest Climate Change and Land, IPCC special report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems. The impacts of wildfires on soils and ecosystems severely affect ecosystem services supply such as raw material and water provisioning, carbon storage, erosion and flood control, and habitat support, which are essential for human life. Therefore, attention of researchers, stakeholders and decision makers worldwide is urgently needed.
The aim of this session is to join researchers that study the effects of wildfires on ecosystems from wildfire prevention to post-fire mitigation. We warmly invite studies that approach:
i. prescribed and/or experimental fires;
ii. fire severity and burn severity;
iii. fire effects on vegetation, soils and water;
iv. post-fire hydrological and erosive response;
v. post-fire management and mitigation;
either by means of laboratory, field experiments, and/or numerical modelling.

Public information:
Short summary and feedback of the session
Our session aimed at bringing together researchers who study the effects of wildfires on ecosystems from wildfire prevention to post-fire mitigation. Overall, all the objectives of the session were addressed, and the main outcomes from this session agree in the need for a multidisciplinary approach to implement adequate pre-and post-fire management. It should be highlighted that many advances are being made:
• at the level of using remote-sense technologies to address wildfire risk and fuel connectivity within rural-urban interfaces;
• in the development of direct and indirect techniques to determine/estimate impacts of fires in soil properties;
• more than in the past, we can now observe more studies addressing post-fire mitigation treatments;
• the same way, several advances were made in modeling post-fire hydrological response and soil erosion processes.