Background
Quantifying and predicting wildland fire behavior is crucial for fire management, ecological research and mitigating wildfire impacts. Rate of spread (ROS), fireline intensity (FI) and fire radiative power (FRP) are key fire behavior metrics.
Aims
It is widely perceived that wildfire activity has increased across the western United States (WUS), with studies generally focusing on large wildfires. This study examines changes in the number of wildfire ignitions and burned area in the WUS using a comprehensive record of more than 750 000 wildfire incidents from 1992 to 2020 across biophysical gradients, seasons, and ignition causes.
Contemporary North American wildfires exhibit increasingly erratic intraday burning, posing immediate operational and socioeconomic challenges. Here, we show that climate-driven weakening of day-night (diurnal) weather constraints extends and intensifies burning hours, a key mechanism behind broader fire regime transformations.
We created the first annually resolved records of historical fire occurrence coupled with precise estimates of tree establishment for the northern half of the west slope of the Oregon Cascades, a region that is home to some of the most productive forests on earth.
This study investigates the key drivers influencing prescribed fire effects across 16 sites in northern and central California, with particular emphasis on how operational decisions by fire practitioners shape burn outcomes.
Adoption of the Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP) in 1994 marked a pivotal moment in federal forest management in the Pacific Northwest, shifting focus away from intensive timber harvest toward an ecosystem management approach that emphasized late successional and old forest habitat with the creation of a reserve network across moist and dry forest zones.
Methods
A custom firebrand tracking system consisting of three synchronised video cameras positioned orthogonally around the working section of a vertical wind tunnel was built and bespoke image processing algorithms developed to automatically reconstruct the 3D trajectory and combustion behaviour of a bark sample.
Key results
Background
The spread of canyon fire often involves sudden acceleration, which is related to eruptive fire.
Aims
The purpose of the study is to explore the pattern of fire line evolution and rate of spread (ROS) with topographic conditions in canyon fire, and to clarify the critical conditions for and mechanism of eruptive fire.
Despite widespread concern over increases in wildfire severity, the mechanisms underlying this trend remain unclear, hampering our ability to mitigate the severity of future fires.
Area burned by wildfire has increased in western US forests and elsewhere over recent decades coincident with warmer and drier fire seasons. However, high–severity fire—fire that kills all or most trees—is arguably a more important metric of fire activity given its destabilizing influence on forest ecosystems and direct and indirect impacts to human communities.