Fuel breaks need more regime-scale empirical research: Insights from a rapid evidence review

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From an initial pool of 1585 scientific journal articles, only six articles took an empirical, quantitative approach to assessing fuel break effectiveness at the regime scale. The six selected studies suggest that fuel breaks can modify fire behaviour and support suppression efforts. However, this effectiveness depends on many factors including weather, fire behavior, suppression resource availability, vegetation type and condition, and fuel break width, accessibility and maintenance. Importantly, fuel break performance declines substantially under extreme weather conditions.