The Fourth Fire Behavior and Fuels Conference was held in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, February 18-22, 2013. The theme for this conference was At The Crossroads: Looking Toward the Future in a Changing Environment. Joint sponsorship of the conference was by the International Association of Wildland Fire (IAWF) and the International Association for Fire Safety Science (IAFSS). A second session of the conference was held in St. Petersburg, Russia, July 1-4, 2013 in conjunction with National Research Tomsk State University and Worchester Polytechnic Institute. The joint conferences proceedings contain 71 written contributions.

The Raleigh session included fourteen all or part-day workshops and a fire science quiz bowl that preceded the conference on Monday, February 18th. The conference opened on the morning of February 19th and included seven plenary speakers, one hundred thirteen oral presentations, two moderated panel discussions, sixty-seven poster presenters and a mid-week banquet. Attendance was lower than anticipated due to economic constraints, however 350 were present and evaluations of the conference were quite positive.

The St. Petersburg edition was developed in order to extend the international outreach of the conference and create more opportunities for international collaborations around fire behavior and fuel research. This first attempt outside of the USA was a success, with around 150 attendees from all around the world with a large participation from Russia, 7 keynote presentations, plus 75 oral presentations and over 40 posters representing the last research developments in fire behavior and fuel modeling from 21 countries. The first day was dedicated to workshops with 5 workshops about new applications developed in research and now available to end-users. Among those, a half-day workshop was organized by IJWF (International Journal of Wildland Fires, the official journal of IAWF) to train non-native speakers to publish in scientific Journals in English. During 3 days of conference all presentations were made on most actual topics: Fuel, Management, Fire Behavior, Remote Sensing, Fire Research and Impact, Simulations, Smoke, Extreme Fires and Wildland-Urban Interface.