Metrics into management: which measures of landscape moisture best inform wildfire planning and response?

Landscape moisture, encompassing water in the air, soil and vegetation, significantly impacts wildfire behaviour by affecting fuel availability. Fire managers require landscape moisture information to make informed decisions at various spatiotemporal scales. Despite improvements in modelling and remote sensing technologies, very few landscape moisture metrics are currently used in fire management decision-making, and there has been no comprehensive assessment of their suitability to inform different decisions. This review addressed this gap by combining fire management expertise with a qualitative review of landscape moisture metrics. Participants described the attributes that influence the usefulness of a moisture metric across four decision-making scales: seasonal planning, wildfire preparedness, wildfire response and prescribed burning. We used this information to develop qualitative criteria to evaluate 30 landscape moisture metrics with potential utility for fire decision making, including measures of dead fuel moisture, live fuel moisture, atmospheric moisture, soil moisture and drought conditions. Different metrics had high potential across different scales of decision-making. Importantly, we identified metrics not currently used in Australian fire management but with high suitability for use. We discuss the challenges and next steps to integrating these metrics into operational systems, and highlight how our framework can be applied in other fire-prone regions.