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Open research questions in Fire effects on ecosystems

94 unresolved questions extracted from the limitations and future-work sections of 983 Fire effects on ecosystems papers in our library. Each links back to the study that raised it.

What the literature leaves open

  • Background Atmospheric dryness, measured as vapor pressure deficit (VPD), is rising with climate warming, yet its joint impacts on tree growth, fire activity and biomass dynamics remain understudied at broad spatial scales.

    Atmospheric dryness as a coordinated driver of fire activity and biomass accumulation in northwestern boreal Canada · 2026 · DOI

  • and influence implementation of fire management interventions. Local knowledge, community participation and collaborative research are essential components of a cross-cultural and integrated approach to fire management. Practical safeguard principles should emphasize socio-ecological harmony, should prioritize collaboration that reduces fire risk and should encourage interaction between organizations15. In addition, wise land management practices, such as multi-use agriculture and shifting cultivation, can provide valuable ecosystem services by reducing biomass accumulation and by mitigating the risk of fires. However, these practices are often not explicitly in ecosystem service included assessments31. The peri-urban area of Banjarbaru is expected to face similar challenges related to spatial fire hazards and the need for robust fire risk management, given the rapid dynamics of urbanization and land-use shifts. In 2025, Banjarbaru city experienced 46 fires in various areas, including Cempaka, Landasan Ulin and Lianganggang. These fires damaged 137,349 hectares of land. This figure demonstrates the importance of local issues. It is hoped that this study will provide policymakers, researchers and practitioners with valuable information on creating more efficient and sustainable fire mitigation strategies in the peri-urban area of Banjarbaru. Furthermore, this study will serve as a model for similar WUI areas in Indonesia. Therefore, the objective of this study is to assess spatial fire hazards and identify practical protection principles for managing fire risk in the peri-urban area of Banjarbaru. In doing so, the study considers the complex social, economic and environmental dynamics present in the area.

    Assessment of Spatial Fire Hazards and Safeguard Principles for Fire Risk Management in the Peri-Urban Area of Banjarbaru · 2026 · DOI

  • Since the extent of internal stem decay is known to vary widely between different forest ecosystems and data from moist temperate forests exhibited low significance of internal stem decay, we studied dry, frequently fire-exposed Pinus ponderosa forests in central Oregon to capture the other climatic extreme of temperate forests.

    Low impact of internal stem decay on forest carbon stocks in fire-prone Pinus ponderosa forests · 2026 · DOI

  • Significance StatementFire management decisions on public lands often overlook recreation and other non-material benefits of nature, in part because evidence is lacking on how fire reshapes human-nature relationships.

    Large Recreation Declines Persist for Years after Severe Wildfire but Not after Low-Severity or Prescribed Fire · 2026 · DOI

  • Future work should consider additional fire behavior parameters that may influence charcoal chemistry and spectral responses. We demonstrate that neural network deep learning models have an even better prediction rate than the k-nearest neighbor func- tion in MAT and should be further explored as a metric to predict maximum pyrolysis temperature and plant species burned.

    Machine learning enables reconstruction of past fire regimes from charcoal-derived fire intensity and fuel composition · 2026 · DOI

  • This study used samples from 0–5 cm and 5–15 cm from plots that were treated with annual, bien- nial, quinquennial and infrequent spring-burn treat- ments. Future studies could continue and expand this research by including seasonality and deeper soil sample depths. The burning season significantly influences the growth of vegetation (Trollope 2009) and the effect of fire on SOC (Findlay et al. 2022). Therefore, it would be relevant to also look at the effect of season of burn on carbon distribution in soils. Regarding the depth of sampling, Ward et al. (2016) reported considerable carbon stocks in British mesic grassland soils at depths of 30 cm to 100 cm, with significant effects of management. This poten- tially suggests an important research gap for the effects of fire regimes on soil C to depths greater than those examined here. Carbon sequestration is cur- rently considered to be a climate mitigation option (Lavallee et al. 2019; Veldman et al. 2015; Viret and Grand 2019). However, the long-term effects of fire on soil carbon storage (and its implication for climate change) remains poorly understood. Fire exclusion policies have potentially harmed stable carbon stor- age (Gao et al. 2024), therefore further researching the soil carbon storage potential as a result of fire will therefore be an important direction for future studies (Lavallee et al. 2019; Rumpel et al. 2020).

    Fire frequency differentially affects carbon pools and pyrogenic organic matter in a South African montane grassland · 2026 · DOI

  • 21 m, both well Vehicles—UAVs, helicopters), and the operational range and duration are limited by the platform’s battery life and load capacity [45–47], which may restrict its application in large- scale, long-duration forest fire monitoring [48,49].

    Research on Accurate Fire Point Positioning Technology in the Forest Region of Northeast China Based on Aerial Photography · 2026 · DOI

  • Kakadu’s fire regime has clearly changed in response to contemporary fire management, with some achievement of the KNPMP performance indicators inferred by our fire metrics. However, these achievements do not yet translate to demonstrated benefits for flora and fauna. This case study highlights a fundamental gap in Kakadu’s fire management planning, as there is limited ability to interpret what these changes mean for biodiversity or to set targets for biodiversity in the future. There has likely been some effect of the altered fire regime on Kakadu’s plants and animals (Charles et al. 2025), and determining the nature of that effect is a current research priority for Kakadu’s Traditional Owners (Cooper et al. 2024). Indeed, the KNPMP lists an objective to “maintain the condition of the park’s natural values, and support the recovery of threatened species”, with the outcome of this being that “the abundance of significant species is increased (where possible and appropriate) or maintained” (Australian Government 2016). Monitoring changes in species populations can be difficult, requiring sound scientific methods (Lindenmayer and Likens 2010). In Kakadu, the “Three Parks Savanna Fireeffects Plot Network” is a monitoring program that has been ongoing since 1980 to measure the impacts of fire regimes on flora and fauna populations spatially and temporally (Edwards et al. 2003; Russell-Smith et al. 2014). Still, outside of this there are significant gaps in contemporary monitoring of flora and fauna in the region (Preece and Fitzsimons 2022). Such programs can also be logistically challenging and costly across a large protected area like Kakadu. Harnessing complementary approaches such as habitat suitability models (Haslem et al. 2024) could assist with targeting direct monitoring and identifying areas most at risk of negative fire impacts. Identifying important areas of biodiversity and bush tucker and protecting them from unsuitable fire regimes is a priority of Kakadu park managers (Australian Government 2016). Subsequent targeted monitoring could assist with validating models and improving adaptive management in the future (Anderson et al. 2016). Optimized population monitoring in Kakadu will be critical to understand how contemporary fire regime changes have influenced biodiversity, and how fire should be managed to conserve it (Lindenmayer et al. 2025). Sufficient resources should be directed into making informed fire management decisions for Australia’s tropical savannas (Murphy et al. 2025). Future fire management should consider how interacting threats such as climate change, invasive species, and altered vegetation structure compound fire effects.

    Contemporary management has altered the fire regime of a large protected area: evaluating management outcomes and future directions · 2026 · DOI

  • The mean-risk model with empirical expectation (EE) risk measure is demonstrated on a specific study area, but broader applicability to other regions with different fire characteristics, climate zones, or resource availability patterns is not discussed.

    Mean-risk stochastic integer programming approach for integrated fuel treatment and wildfire response planning with endogenous uncertainty · 2026 · DOI

  • Fire behavior simulations are performed with 30 independent runs per scenario in FlamMap/FARSITE, but the paper does not discuss sensitivity analysis or uncertainty quantification regarding simulation model accuracy.

    Mean-risk stochastic integer programming approach for integrated fuel treatment and wildfire response planning with endogenous uncertainty · 2026 · DOI

  • Scenario construction is limited to a maximum of six fires based on empirical distribution from 1993 to 2020 data, which may not capture unprecedented fire events that could occur under changing climate conditions.

    Mean-risk stochastic integer programming approach for integrated fuel treatment and wildfire response planning with endogenous uncertainty · 2026 · DOI

  • The methodology integrates four types of a housing structure, limited to a radius of 100 meters around each house and three classes of vegetation aggregation.

    Mapping the Wildland-Urban Interfaces for Forest Fire Prevention in the Province of Mila (Algeria) · 2020 · DOI

  • While ecosystem impacts of altered fire regimes have been examined in the literature, little is known of the effects of changing fire regimes on forest understory plant diversity even though understory taxa comprise the vast majority of forest plant species and play vital roles in overall ecosystem function.

    The species diversity × fire severity relationship is hump‐shaped in semiarid yellow pine and mixed conifer forests · 2019 · DOI

  • Due to the scarcity of documentary fire records and the lack of tree‐ring fire histories, little is known about how wildfire activity responds to shifts in the westerly circulation pattern and associated climatic variability in the Andean region south of ~44° S.

    Fire history in southern Patagonia: human and climate influences on fire activity in <i>Nothofagus pumilio</i> forests · 2017 · DOI

  • In cases where detailed data are available, S&T models can be developed into probabilistic predictions, but even where data are insufficient to predict transition probabilities, conceptual S&T models can provide valuable insights for managing a given ecosystem and for comparing and contrasting different ecosystem dynamics.

    Ecosystem dynamics and management after forest die‐off: a global synthesis with conceptual state‐and‐transition models · 2017 · DOI

  • Abstract Forested wetlands dominated by black ash ( Fraxinus nigra ) are currently threatened by the rapid expansion of the exotic emerald ash borer (EAB; Agrilus planipennis , Coleoptera: Buprestidae) in North America, and very little is known about the hydrology and ecology of black ash wetlands.

    Source water contributions and hydrologic responses to simulated emerald ash borer infestations in depressional black ash wetlands · 2017 · DOI

  • Containment time, fire growth rate, and energy release metrics varied by 1 more order of magnitude than ELF size, hence indicating that size alone is insufficient to describe extreme fires.

    Characteristics and controls of extremely large wildfires in the western Mediterranean Basin · 2016 · DOI

  • The lead times between ocean state and the period of maximum burning (4–11 months) may enable the development of forecasts with benefits for forest conservation, yet the underlying physical and biological mechanisms responsible for these temporal offsets are not well known.

    Satellite observations of terrestrial water storage provide early warning information about drought and fire season severity in the Amazon · 2013 · DOI

  • Conclusions We found that models that accounted for tree size can more precisely estimate changes in forest size structure than a similar model that did not account for tree size.

    Estimating basal area change by tree size with Sentinel-2 imagery following four fires in California, USA · 2026 · DOI

  • Finally, reforestation value chain activities must adapt to novel reforestation require- ments through training and investment, while future research should address existing tech- nical, technological and political constraints.

    Reforestation following megafires in boreal forests: silvicultural challenges and available tools · 2026 · DOI

  • Overall, the greater variability of most metrics obtained from the subplot method, compared to those calculated using the whole plot, suggests that calculating metrics on a subplot scale is warranted.

    Measuring fuel connectivity in coastal mallee shrublands using terrestrial mobile LiDAR · 2026 · DOI

  • , check dams, log barriers, sediment retention structures) remain comparatively under-investigated or are often subsumed under broader environmen- tal management categories. However, the comparatively low representation of “Engineering” points to a potential gap in the literature.

    Trends in Post-Fire Erosion Studies: A Bibliometric Analysis · 2026 · DOI

  • While overall impacts of heatwaves have been extensively studied, the connection between heatwaves and wildfire activity remains relatively underexplored.

    Heatwaves enable wildfire activity in the western United States · 2026 · DOI

  • Despite growing interest in Indigenous fire stewardship practices and knowledge, there is a substantial gap in the literature relating to empirical research documenting First Nations peoples’ voices/experiences/effects of bushfire.

    The experiences of First Nations peoples as presented in Australian bushfire research: a scoping review · 2026 · DOI

  • Yet how either fire type reshapes visitation, remains poorly quantified, limiting managers' ability to account for important hidden values provided by public lands.

    Large Recreation Declines Persist for Years after Severe Wildfire but Not after Low-Severity or Prescribed Fire · 2026 · DOI

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94 open questions have been extracted from the limitations and future-work passages of 983 Fire effects on ecosystems papers in our library. Each one below links back to the study that raised it, so you can read the original claim in context.

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