Your Backyard Forest - Protect Your Property From Wildfire

Fire needs oxygen, fuel, and heat to burn. To prevent fire, you need to eliminate or reduce the availability of these ingredients. Since oxygen can't be easily eliminated (it is always present in the air), the focus of fire prevention is on fuel and heat sources.
Fuel can be living or dead material that will ignite, carry fire, and burn. In your backyard woods, fuel includes standing and fallen trees, shrubs, and ground cover. Your home and outbuildings are also fuel. Fuels on the ground allow fire to spread more easily along the ground. Fuels above the ground allow fire to spread upwards and even climb into the tops of trees, where it can spread rapidly from tree to tree.
When the essential ingredients for fire are present, weather and topography affect how fire will behave. Weather is the more important factor because it affects the moisture content of fuels. High temperatures dry and preheat fuels. Low relative humidity and wind also dry fuels out. Dry preheated fuels require less added heat to start a fire. Wind also affects how large a fire will become, by affecting the direction and speed at which the fire will move.
Topography or slope of the land also affects how fast a fire will spread. Fires tend to spread much faster uphill. Fires spread fastest on hillsides facing west or south because they are exposed to more direct sunlight, which causes the fuels to be drier.