Modern Technologies and Applications for Innovative Forest Fire Management

Dear Colleagues,

Wildfire management plays a crucial role in improving the sustainability of forests by mitigating the negative impacts of wildfires and promoting ecological resilience. Advancement of novel sensing technologies, including remote sensing,  joined with data from citizen volunteers and publicly available data, provides a fertile ground for innovation and excellence in forest management. Recent advances in robotics have allowed cutting-edge innovations to be made in the surveillance and suppression of wildfires. New forecasting models and techniques for natural and climate changes, in addition to providing insight into future regimes, help guide methods for mitigating their effects.

This Special Issue invites original submissions and review articles describing  innovations in conceptual, technical and computational methods and solutions in wildfire management for sustainable forestry.

In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Research areas may include (but not limited to) the following:

Wildfire prevention:

- Wildfire monitoring;

- Automatic early wildfire detection;

- Machine learning techniques for wildfire prediction;

- Wildfire risk assessment;

- Future and fire resilient landscape management;

- Spatial analysis for firebreaks planning;

- Remote sensing wildfire risk prediction;

- Decision support systems for wildfire prevention;

- Citizen science for wildfire risk assessment and prevention;

- Meteorology and forecasting in seasonal and daily fire risk assessment.

Wildfire suppression:

- Wildfire real time surveillance;

- Sensor systems for fire monitoring, surveillance and probing;

- Wildfire digital twin technologies and applications;

- Decision support systems for efficient fire suppression;

- Fire propagation and behaviour simulation and prediction;

- Wind speed and direction interpolation for wildfire simulation and modeling.

Wildfire post analysis:

- Remote sensing for fire analysis;

- Using volunteer geographical information (VGI) for fire analysis;

- Statistical approaches for fire season analysis;

- Data mining techniques for spatial and temporal distribution of fire reports;

- Mapping fire ignitions and spatial analysis;

- Remote sensing and mapping in wildfire management;

- Fuels and fuel load estimation.

Wildfires in future:

- Climate change scenarios and future fire regimes;

- Land use change detection and fire susceptibility.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Ljiljana Seric
Prof. Dr. Ioannis Gitas
Prof. Dr. Damir Krstinić
Dr. Marin Bugaric
Dr. Fermín Alcasena
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.