Mediterranean landscapes are in a state of flux due to the impacts of changing land‐use patterns and climate. Fuel–weather interactions determine that large, severe wildfires are increasingly common. Prescribed burning in southern Europe is therefore justified by the need to manage fire‐prone vegetation types and maintain cultural landscapes that provide a range of ecosystem services. Prescribed fire has neutral or positive effects on soils and biodiversity, in contrast to wildfires, which can be extremely damaging. However, the limited extent of current applications are unlikely to reduce wildfire hazard or carbon emissions. Adoption of prescribed burning in the Mediterranean region has been slow, uneven, and inconsistent, and its development is constrained by cultural and socioeconomic factors as well as by specific factors related to demography, land use, and landscape structure. Sustainable fire management requires expansion of managers' ability to use prescribed burning, a varied response to unplanned fires, and modified regulation of burning associated with traditional agricultural land uses.

A shrubland fire behaviour dataset was assembled using data from experimental studies in Australia, New Zealand, Europe and South Africa. The dataset covers a wide range of heathlands and shrubland species associations and vegetation structures. Three models for rate of spread are developed using 2-m wind speed, a wind reduction factor, elevated dead fuel moisture content and either vegetation height (with or without live fuel moisture content) or bulk density. The models are tested against independent data from prescribed fires and wildfires and found to predict fire spread rate within acceptable limits (mean absolute errors varying between 3.5 and 9.1 m min À1 ). A simple model to predict dead fuel moisture content is evaluated, and an ignition line length correction is proposed. Although the model can be expected to provide robust predictions of rate of spread in a broad range of shrublands, the effects of slope steepness and variation in fuel quantity and composition are yet to be quantified. The model does not predict threshold conditions for continuous fire spread, and future work should focus on identifying fuel and weather factors that control transitions in fire behaviour.

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