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Fire regimes are changing across the globe, with new wildfire behaviour phenomena and increasing impacts felt, especially in ecosystems without clear adaptations to wildfire. These trends pose significant challenges to the scientific community in understanding and communicating these changes and their implications, particularly where we lack underlying scientific evidence to inform decision-making. Here, we present a perspective on priority directions for wildfire science research—through the lens of academic and government wildfire scientists from a historically wildfire-prone (USA) and emerging wildfire-prone (UK) country. Key topic areas outlined during a series of workshops in 2023 were as follows: (A) understanding and predicting fire occurrence, fire behaviour and fire impacts; (B) increasing human and ecosystem resilience to fire; and (C) understanding the atmospheric and climate impacts of fire. Participants agreed on focused research questions that were seen as priority scientific research gaps. Fire behaviour was identified as a central connecting theme that would allow critical advances to be made across all topic areas. These findings provide one group of perspectives to feed into a more transdisciplinary outline of wildfire research priorities across the diversity of knowledge bases and perspectives that are critical in addressing wildfire research challenges under changing fire regimes. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Novel fire regimes under climate changes and human influences: impacts, ecosystem responses and feedbacks’. 

Abstract Patterns of energy and available moisture can vary over small (<1 km) distances in mountainous terrain. Information on fuel and soil moisture conditions that resolves this variation could help to inform fire and drought management decisions. Here, we describe the development of TOPOFIRE, a web-based mapping system designed to provide finely resolved information on soil water balance, drought, and wildfire danger information for the contiguous United States. We developed 8-arc-second-resolution (~250 meter) daily historical, near real-time, and 4-day forecast radiation, temperature, humidity, and snow water equivalent data and used these grids to calculate a suite of drought and wildfire danger indices. Large differences in shortwave radiation and surface air temperature with aspect contribute to greater snow accumulation and delays in melt timing on north-facing slopes, delaying fuel conditioning on shaded slopes. These datasets will help advance our understanding of the role of topography in wildland fire spread and ecological effects. Integration with national programs like the Wildland Fire Assessment System, the Wildland Fire Decision Support System, and drought early warning systems could support more proactive management of wildland fires and refine the characterization of drought in mountainous regions of the United States.