Wildland fires have become a major research subject among the national and international research community. Different simulation models have been developed to prevent this phenomenon. Nevertheless, fire propagation models are, until now, challenging due to the complexity of physics and chemistry, high computational requirements to solve physical models, and the difficulty defining the input parameters. Nevertheless, researchers have made immense progress in understanding wildland fire spread. This work reviews the state-of-the-art and lessons learned from the relevant literature to drive further advancement and provide the scientific community with a comprehensive summary of the main developments. The major findings or general research-based trends were related to the advancement of technology and computational resources, as well as advances in the physical interpretation of the acceleration of wildfires. Although wildfires result from the interaction between fundamental processes that govern the combustion at the solid- and gas-phase, the subsequent heat transfer and ignition of adjacent fuels are still not fully resolved at a large scale. However, there are some research gaps and emerging trends within this issue that should be given more attention in future investigations. Hence, in view of further improvements in wildfire modeling, increases in computational resources will allow upscaling of physical models, and technological advancements are being developed to provide near real-time predictive fire behavior modeling. Thus, the development of two-way coupled models with weather prediction and fire propagation models is the main direction of future work.

Wildfires are a worldwide phenomenon that as an impact on all surrounding forms of life. Studying these events is essential to develop and optimize the tools used for combat and prevention, and its behavior is associated with the state of the vegetation, atmospheric conditions, ground properties, and many others, constituting an expensive and challenging task. This work presents itself as a complementary work to study the flow over a forest through a CFD model, which causes a modification in the velocity profile due to the drag produced by the forest presence, and the values obtained can be used in a mathematical model to study the fire rate of spread and fireline intensity considering the new velocity field. The CFD model was applied in the commercial software Ansys Fluent. The results confirmed that the wind is a dominant force during a forest fire, i.e., at high velocities the fire has an aggressive behavior and at low velocities tends to calm down. However, due to the unpredictability of certain weather conditions, it is dangerous to say that a forest fire is fully controlled since its behavior can change in a matter of minutes.

Following up the call for research projects launched by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) after the first pandemic event in Portugal, and bearing in mind the positive results obtained, during the summer of 2021, a new call was launched with a shorter duration. During one month just before starting the university academic year, undergraduate students could join a research team in a research lab, and by applying a “learning by doing” approach, students experienced a research atmosphere and got involved with the main activities being developed by the research group. For engineering students, this is an opportunity to bring theory to practice, get experience, and ingress into research teamwork. This paper presents and discusses the main achievements of this initiative, in particular, the research experience of three undergraduate students and their host research teams, from the Algoritmi center, from the School of Engineering of the University of Minho, Portugal. The students’ opinions on the developed projects were quite satisfactory and they recognized that joining this type of scholarship opens horizons, promotes an inquiring spirit, teaches research strategies and, above all, students can see their knowledge applied to engineering research and on the advancement of science.