Sustainable Forest Operations and Wildfire Management: Prevention, Suppression and Restoration

Dear Colleagues,

Forest fires represent one of the most important threats, not only for forests and other wooded lands but also for people and human infrastructures in several areas around the world. In recent decades, this problem has become increasingly serious due to climate change and socio-economical changes. In fact, in developed countries, the abandonment of traditional agricultural and forestry land uses, together with traditional fire suppression policies, have led to an unprecedented build-up of fuel. Moreover, in recent years, severe fire seasons have also been recorded in traditionally non-fine-prone countries/regions. Facing this scenario, some forest operation works are beginning to take on great importance:

• Prevention works, such as shrub clearing with or without mastication, the thinning of young stands, prescribed burning, location and maintenance of strategic management areas, etc.;
• Suppression operations—optimizing resource allocation in direct attacks by ground and air means, backfire setting, fire lines production, communication technologies, safety issues, and others;
• Restoration of burned areas—salvage logging, construction of erosion barriers, sowing and/or plantation, silvicultural interventions to support natural regeneration, among others.

The mechanization of these operations and their planning and control, using advanced technologies, are becoming critical issues and are of great interest to the scientific community. The sensorized automation of the operations following up through electronics applied to the machines themselves, or their monitoring using Lidar, unmanned aerial devices, or satellites, the application of GIS, Internet of Things, artificial vision, machine-to-machine communication, or big data may help to optimize their productivity and cost or improve the control of their efficiency and effectiveness.

We encourage manuscript submissions from all of these outlined fields, including experimental studies about innovative machines or work methods, and technology developments applied to planning those wildfire management operations, as well as their monitoring and control. Contributions of these types are most welcome to this Special Issue in order to share knowledge oriented to defending and adapting forest stands to those growing risks using sustainable and efficient mechanized forest operations.

Dr. Eduardo Tolosana
Prof. Dr. Enrico Marchi
Guest Editors

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