Wed. May 27, 2026 9:00 AM - 10:30 AM Exhibition Hall Special Setting (4) (Exhibition Hall 7&8, Makuhari Messe)

Chairperson:Rengers K Francis(USGS), Tsou Ching-Ying(Faculty of Agriculture and Life Science, Hirosaki University), Koji Tamai(Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute)

Wildfire is a major cross-disciplinary research theme in wildfire-prone regions, including the U.S., Canada, Australia, the Mediterranean, Africa and South America. The wildfire process causes fixed carbon in plant (wood) tissues to be released into atmosphere and the global mass of the released carbon by wildfire has affected global warming. On the other hand, the Japanese earth science community has contributed only limitedly through ad-hoc investigations after a few events, such as the 1961 and 1969 wildfires in the Pacific coastal mountains in the northeastern Japan (the Sanriku region), the 1968 wildfire in Edajima in western Japan (the Setouchi region), and the 1983 wildfires in the Tohoku region. In the spring of 2025, wildfire concurrently occurred in several places in Japan, including the Sanriku (Ohfunato) and Setouchi (Okayama and Imabari) regions. These events invited public attention to wildfire in Japan, presumably because they thought the wildfires were related to the present climate change and would occur more frequently, causing negative effects geoecologically and socially. Likewise, wildfire might have attracted only limited scientific attention in Asia, but, for instance, massive wildfire in peatlands in Indonesia has repeatedly occurred during the periods of drier climate according to the ENSO cycle. In the mainland Southeast Asia and Indian regions, extensive agricultural land-use have caused wildfire during the dry months and wildfire is an issue to be addressed for better management.

This session aims to widen assemblages of knowledge on wildfire by reviewing existing research and presenting ongoing investigations from wildfire-prone regions and also from less researched Asian regions, including Japan. A wide range of studies with perspectives typically from geomorphology, hydrology, meteorology, ecology, spatial-data science, social science and environmental engineering and also from other relevant subjects are welcomed.