We're pleased to announce the latest release of BurnP3+ (v2.6.11), a SyncroSim package for wildfire modeling managed by the Canadian Forest Service. This release follows a significant period of development and brings meaningful improvements across performance, reliability, and modeling flexibility.

Performance and scalability

If you're working with large landscapes or high numbers of simulated fires, recent versions of BurnP3+ have improved how the package manages memory and processes data. Internally, BurnP3+ now uses the Parquet file format to store and summarize fire outputs. This is a columnar storage format that enables efficient handling of large datasets and reduces memory overhead during processing, allowing BurnP3+ to scale more effectively to realistic modeling scenarios that previously may have been slow or memory-intensive to run.

Multi-run workflows

BurnP3+ now includes a new transformer that allows users to merge burn outputs from multiple fire growth model runs. This is useful when a run did not complete or did not include sufficient realizations; outputs can be combined across runs without starting from scratch, making it easier to break large jobs into smaller computational chunks or recover from interrupted runs.

Burn perimeter and fire behavior outputs

This version introduces support for daily burn perimeters, which are now saved as geopackages to integrate smoothly with tools like QGIS and ArcGIS. Fire behavior outputs have been consolidated and aligned across all fire growth models, making results easier to interpret and compare. Resampling logic was also improved so that fire records are tracked consistently throughout all outputs.

BurnP3+ now also provides options to summarize fire behavior outputs (such as Fire Intensity) across realizations, including mean, median, and user-specified quantiles. Previously, only individual per-fire FBP outputs were available; these cross-realization summaries make it much easier to characterize the distribution of fire behavior at the landscape scale.

Reliability and compatibility

Across recent versions, we’ve addressed a wide range of reliability improvements, including better input validation, improved handling of edge cases and missing data, and fixes to compatibility with conda environments. There have also been significant improvements to increase compatibility with Linux environments, making BurnP3+ more accessible for production environments.

Add-on package updates

Fire growth add-on packages to BurnP3+, BurnP3+Prometheus (v2.5.5) and BurnP3+FireSTARR (v1.5.7), have also been updated alongside this release. Since their previous releases, both packages received improvements to memory cleanup during long runs. BurnP3+Prometheus also adopted Parquet for intermediate data storage and additional compatibility updates.

Note that BurnP3+Cell2Fire was not updated alongside this release. While the package remains available, we are not actively developing or maintaining it and recommend using BurnP3+Prometheus or BurnP3+FireSTARR for new projects.

Get started

Whether you are new to BurnP3+ or returning after some time away, now is a great time to explore what the package can do. You can download the latest version through the SyncroSim package manager or visit the BurnP3+ GitHub repo. Have questions or feedback? Join the conversation on the SyncroSim Community Forum.