Fire is a natural ecosystem process that helps maintain and revitalize healthy landscapes, but wildfires can pose significant threats to public and firefighter safety, property, water and air quality, and other values. Finding an appropriate balance of managing for the beneficial and detrimental impacts of fire can be a challenge, and in many forest and grassland ecosystems, a legacy of fire exclusion and changes in land use patterns has led to unnatural accumulations of flammable vegetation and increasing wildfire hazard. Wildfire management entails a breadth of actions taken before, during and after fires occur, including fuel or vegetation management, prevention, detection, resource staging and deployment, incident response and recovery.