Changes in fire regimes, including changes in fire intensity, frequency, and seasonality have resulted from anthropogenic activities including shifts in land use, land management practices, urbanization of the wildlands, and human-caused climate change (e.g., Bowman et al., 2020; Coop et al., 2020). The clear human fingerprint on fire activity in many regions (Archibald et al., 2013) indicates that landscape management may alter the trajectory of fire regimes in a changing climate. This hopeful call to action requires a sound understanding of landscape management effects on across different fire regimes in the context of other human and biophysical factors. It is challenging to isolate the individual contributions of these factors given their diverse spatial and temporal footprints. However, a diversity of modeling efforts can be used to improve understanding of changing fire regimes, to assess vulnerability to societal and ecosystem values, and to help design and test effective management options that would mitigate undesirable outcomes (e.g., fire impacts to communities, degradation of air quality, change in ecosystem structure, feedbacks to global climate) while preserving many of the ecological benefits of fire. Recent trends in extreme fire seasons including the 2019–2020 Southeast Australian bushfires (Nolan et al., 2020) and the 2020 Western United States fires (Higuera and Abatzoglou, 2020) catalyze the need to deliver useful science-based information to decision-makers for devising effective adaptive strategies to reduce the impacts from future extreme fire seasons.

Humans have long influenced fire regimes, albeit in complex and heterogeneous ways (e.g., Pyne 1993). Land use changes have continued in recent decades as agricultural expansion and intensification have reduced burned area in grasslands and savannas (e.g., Andela et al., 2017), while land exploitation and deforestation have increased fire occurrence in peatlands (e.g., Normile 2019) and forests (e.g., Escobar 2019). While fire is a biophysical process, human behavior and decisions drive many global fire regimes and changes thereof. Humans dictate many fire regimes though a number of vehicles: adding ignitions in places and at times of year that ecosystems have not been subject to in the past (e.g., Syphard and Keeley 2014; Balch et al., 2017); introducing invasive species that cause surface fuel continuity where patchiness prevented fire spread (e.g., Brooks et al., 2004); suppressing fire thereby allowing for fuel accumulation and expansion of fire sensitive species (e.g., Novacki and Abrams 2008); establishing fire-prone homogeneous tree plantations (e.g., Zald and Dunn 2018); and expanding the wildland urban interface (e.g., Mietkiewicz et al., 2020). Human migration as a result of climate change, economics, and local conflicts for dwindling resources (e.g., Cattaneo et al., 2019) suggest continued changes in human fingerprint on fire regimes across much of the planet.

This Research Topic included seven articles that used a diversity of modeling approaches to assess how climate, land use, and other anthropogenic factors influence fire regimes to inform managers and land stewards. Studies focused on different fire prone environments across the globe from Brazil to the southwestern United States and Canada, from southeastern Australia to the Mediterranean basin. Because fire impacts vary widely across ecosystems, geographies and scales, a hierarchy of modelling approaches is required to meet the different goals of fire management, for instance reduction of fire risk, conservation of threatened ecosystem types and biodiversity, increase in carbon storage, or mitigation of anthropogenic climate change. The contributions that constitute this Research Topic highlight both a search for better understanding of fire-ecosystem responses to a constellation of anthropogenic factors and the development of vehicles that deliver usable information and tools to land managers and decision makers preparing for both the next fire season as well as that of the next several decades.

Since fuels reduction is a hot topic issue and is often brandished as the one size fits all solution to the extreme fire behavior, we highlight two articles (Clarke et al., 2020; O’Connor et al., 2020) that show the importance of fuels reduction in one dryland ecosystem and the only short term success in another. A second grouping of studies highlighted the various ways in which modeling can more broadly inform management decisions, including a review of various modeling efforts to help managers assess and address ecosystem stability (Loehman et al., 2020), the identification of non-stationarity in extreme fire seasons that emphasizes the need for modernizing fire risk approaches (Barbero et al., 2020), and the importance of ecosystem threshold behavior in savanna ecosystems to changing fire frequency that will require agile models forecasting such drastic change in conditions (Gomes et al., 2020). Two final papers highlight next steps for the fire modeling community: the well known goal of improving earth system models that are used to simulate future climate and could be used to assess the climate mitigation potential of fire management to inform international policy (D’Onofrio et al., 2020); the potential of linking fire regime characteristics with fire management decisions in modeling efforts to create more useful tools to address the challenges ahead (Taylor 2020).

Continued efforts are needed to understand the roles played by top-down climate factors and bottom-up land-management in the tapestry of changing global fire regimes. Investigating different scenarios of human activities, including management, may be as important as investigating climate scenarios to understand the potential and the boundaries of the human leverage. Integration of scientific understanding with practitioners’ local knowledge is the key to develop effective management strategies for different landscapes at actionable scales to achieve desirable fire regime outcomes (e.g., reduced fire risks, conservation of ecosystem services)—particularly under otherwise non-stationary environmental and societal conditions. Studies such as those highlighted in this Research Topic showcase that models provide advances in understanding and provide outcomes that can inform management while being critically challenged and improved by collaborations with field practitioners. Ongoing changes in environmental and societal landscapes and their collective impacts on fire regimes reinforces the need to develop tools that provide guidance how fire management can be used to mitigate fire risk. Bringing together modelers, field ecologists, managers, and practitioners to share their respective knowledge will not only facilitate the development of effective adaptation strategies but also create better science. As Thomas Kuhn simply stated it, the answers you get depend upon the questions you ask and managers do have many questions for the scientists.

All authors wrote, edited, and reviewed the submission.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.