Along the past century, in many parts of the world, for human and natural causes, forest fires have become an increasing threat to ambient and man. At the broadest scale, forest fires interest researchers from very different areas, such as: forestry, ecology, geography, physics and chemistry, mechanical and chemical engineering, and applied mathematics. At a finer scale, forest fire physics can be considered mainly as a sub-area of fire science, itself a part of combustion science, but has also important intersections with forestry (fuels characterisation) and meteorology (interactions between the fire and the atmosphere, at various spatial and temporal scales). Within the different phenomena that have been studied, the quasi-steady propagation of surface forest fire fronts of low-to-medium intensity is the most developed research subject of forest fire physics, which justifies the emphasis of the workshop. Since the nineties, the two-sided challenge of constructing models describing the behaviour of the fire front that are, on the one hand, physically sound and general, and, on the other hand, potentially applicable on operational grounds, has originated the proposal of a diversity of modelling strategies, each one of them giving rise to some hard mathematical problems. Such strategies are in different stages of theoretical development and antagonize or complement each other in a larger or lesser extent, none of them self-imposing as clearly superior to the others. The choice of the lecturers precisely reflects the desire to encompass the most relevant strategies that have been proposed.

The main goals of the event are:

• To promote the communication (i.e., mutual knowledge, criticisms, possible future synergies respecting results and, above all, strategies of research) among researchers with a common interest and competence on theoretical modelling issues of forest fires, with an emphasis on fire front propagation.
  
• To introduce to the Portuguese mathematicians the open mathematical and physical research problems brought up by some representative theoretical modelling strategies that are being used to describe the behaviour of forest fire fronts.