https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal/14753995/homepage/call_for_special_issue_papers.htm
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/pb-assets/assets/14753995/cfp/itor70171-Rev2-EV-1770827222497.pdf
Guest Editors:
Wildfires can have devastating effects on people, societies and the environment. In recent years, many have occurred across different regions of the world, with high intensity and significant impacts.
According to different sources, in Australia’s ‘Black Summer’, the bushfire season of 2019–2020, more than 400 people died (directly or indirectly), more than 20 Mha burned, and three billion animals were displaced or killed due to wildfires. In 2019, in Amazonia, more than 40,000 fires occurred, with an estimated damage of more than USD 900 billion. The wildfires of 2020–2021 in California provoked 33 deaths and destroyed around 10,000 structures. In the wildfires of 2023 in Canada, more than 18 Mha burned and more than 180,000 people were displaced. In the 2023– 2024 season, Chile experienced one of its most devastating wildfire events: more than 130 lives were lost, over 6,000 homes were destroyed and nearly 52,000 hectares burned, with the city of Viña del Mar particularly affected. In southern Europe, in Portugal, from 2017 to 2024, 177 people died and in Greece, only in 2023, 28 people died because of wildfires. In many other regions, wildfires have also become a significant concern because climate change – particularly drier vegetation and soil – favours their occurrence.
Effective wildfire management (WM) requires contributions from many diverse fields. Although operations research (OR) has been used in WM since the early 1960s, we believe its potential and integration with other disciplines in WM can be explored far more extensively. This perspective aligns with the increase in scientific publications over recent years. For example, the number of documents per year with queries for wildfire and optimisation more than doubled over the last five years, in both the Web of Science and Scopus.
This special issue of the International Transactions in Operational Research (ITOR) focuses on addressing WM problems with OR models, methods and tools. Both theoretical and practical contributions are welcome if they address wildfire-related decision/optimisation problems in the WM phase, such as prevention, preparedness, detection, suppression and recovery. Problems not addressed before by OR methodologies, or related to emergent topics, such as extreme wildfires, are particularly welcome.
A non-exhaustive list of WM includes (but is not limited to) the following topics:
Related topics are also welcome. For example: fire spread models (e.g. cellular automata, wave propagation, MTT), fuel characterisation, geographic information systems, ignition prediction, machine learning and reinforcement learning, managing uncertainty, remote sensing, risk analysis, software and decision support systems, spatially explicit modelling and statistics.
OR approaches have been applied to WM in many of the above problems, including behavioural OR, combinatorial optimisation, group decision analysis, heuristics, metaheuristics and matheuristics, mathematical programming, multi-criteria decision analysis (including multi-attribute and multi-objective optimisation), network optimisation, optimisation under uncertainty (including stochastic programming and robust optimisation), queuing theory, simulation and simulationoptimisation.
All papers submitted to this special issue will undergo the standard peer review procedures established by ITOR. Submitted papers must be original, unpublished, and not currently under consideration for publication elsewhere.
All submissions must fit within the journal’s domain statement and will be judged for their relevance to the special issue’s scope, innovativeness, and the extent of theoretical and practical research contribution.
Contributions should be prepared according to the instructions to authors, available at the journal homepage on https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal/14753995/homepage/forauthors.html.
Authors should submit and upload their contributions using the submission site https://wiley.atyponrex. com/journal/ITOR, indicating in their cover letter that the paper is intended for this special issue.
Other inquiries should be sent directly to the guest editors in charge of this issue:
Filipe Alvelos (falvelos@dps.uminho.pt),
Jaime Carrasco Barra (jcarrascob@utem.cl),
Miguel Constantino (miguel.constantino@fc.ul.pt) and
Yu Wei (Yu.Wei@colostate.edu).