Research Database
Displaying 1 - 20 of 170
Enhancing fire emissions inventories for acute health effects studies: integrating high spatial and temporal resolution data
Year: 2025
Background: Daily fire progression information is crucial for public health studies that examine the relationship between population-level smoke exposures and subsequent health events. Issues with remote sensing used in fire emissions inventories (FEI) lead to the possibility of missed exposures that impact the results of acute health effects studies.Aims: This paper provides a method for improving an FEI dataset with readily available information to create a more robust dataset with daily fire progression.Methods: High temporal and spatial resolution burned area information from two FEI…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Enhancing fire emissions inventories for acute health effects studies: integrating high spatial and temporal resolution data
Year: 2025
Background: Daily fire progression information is crucial for public health studies that examine the relationship between population-level smoke exposures and subsequent health events. Issues with remote sensing used in fire emissions inventories (FEI) lead to the possibility of missed exposures that impact the results of acute health effects studies.Aims: This paper provides a method for improving an FEI dataset with readily available information to create a more robust dataset with daily fire progression.Methods: High temporal and spatial…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Comparing modeled soil temperature and moisture dynamics during prescribed fires, slash-pile burns and wildfires
Year: 2025
Background: Wildfires, prescribed fires and slash-pile burns are disturbances that occur in many terrestrial ecosystems. Such fires produce variable surface heat fluxes causing a spectrum of effects on soil, such as seed mortality, nutrient loss, changes in microbial activity and water repellency. Accurately modeling soil heating is vital to predicting these second-order fire effects. The process-based Massman HMV (Heat–Moisture–Vapor) model incorporates soil water evaporation, heat transport and water vapor movement, and captures the observed rapid evaporation of soil moisture. Aims:…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Influence of Time‐Averaging of Climate Data on Estimates of Atmospheric Vapor Pressure Deficit and Inferred Relationships With Wildfire Area in the Western United States
Year: 2025
Vapor pressure deficit (VPD) is a driver of evaporative demand and correlates strongly with wildfire extent in the western United States (WUS). Vapor pressure deficit is the difference between saturation vapor pressure (es) and actual vapor pressure (ea). Because es increases nonlinearly with temperature, calculations of time‐averaged VPD vary depending on the frequency of temperature measurements and how ea is calculated, potentially limiting our understanding of fire‐climate relationships. We calculate eight versions of monthly VPD across the WUS and assess their differences. Monthly VPDs…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Modeling the probability of bark beetle-caused tree mortality as a function of watershed-scale host species presence and basal area
Year: 2025
In recent decades, bark beetle outbreaks have caused mass tree mortality in western US forests, which has led to altered wildfire characteristics, hydrological processes, and forest carbon dynamics. Understanding spatial variability in forest susceptibility to bark beetle outbreaks in the western US could inform strategic forest management to reduce wildfire risk, manage forest carbon, and plan for altered hydrology. The susceptibility of a forest stand to mortality by bark beetles depends on the availability and characteristics of trees of the host tree species. For multiple bark beetle…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Can ‘‘Fire Safe’’ Cigarettes (FSCs) Start Wildfires?
Year: 2025
Over the last 20 years, all states within the US have required all cigarettes sold to be ‘‘fire safe’’ or ‘‘fire standards compliant’’ meaning that they must pass ASTM standard E2187. Though these cigarettes are designed to self-extinguish, there have been recent studies suggesting that these ‘‘fire safe’’ cigarettes (FSCs) can still ignite mattresses and other furnishings, but there has been no guidance for fire investigators whether FSCs can ignite natural fuels, such as duff and needles, that can be the source of a wildland fire. This work sets out to investigate whether FSCs can indeed be…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Increasing Hydroclimatic Whiplash Can Amplify Wildfire Risk in a Warming Climate
Year: 2025
On January 7 and 8, 2025, a series of wind-driven wildfires occurred in Los Angeles County in Southern California. Two of these fires ignited in dense woody chaparral shrubland and immediately burned into adjacent populated areas–the Palisades Fire on the coastal slopes of the Santa Monica Mountains and the Eaton fire in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. Both fires ultimately eclipsed the traditionally-defined “wildland-urban interface” boundaries by burning structure-to-structure as an urban conflagration. The scope of the devastation is staggering; at the time of writing, the…
Publication Type: Report
Evaluating a simulation-based wildfire burn probability map for the conterminous US
Year: 2025
Background: Wildfire simulation models are used to derive maps of burn probability (BP) based on fuels, weather, topography and ignition locations, and BP maps are key components of wildfire risk assessments.Aims: Few studies have compared BP maps with real-world fires to evaluate their suitability for near-future risk assessment. Here, we evaluated a BP map for the conterminous US based on the large fire simulation model FSim.Methods: We compared BP with observed wildfires from 2016 to 2022 across 128 regions representing similar fire regimes (‘pyromes’). We…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Wildland fire entrainment: The missing link between wildland fire and its environment
Year: 2025
Wildfires are growing in destructive power, and accurately predicting the spread and intensity of wildland fire is essential for managing ecological and societal impacts. No current operational models used for fire behavior prediction resolve critical fire-atmospheric coupling or nonlocal influences of the fire environment, rendering them inadequate in accounting for the range of wildland fire behavior scenarios under increasingly novel fuel and climate conditions. Here, we present a new perspective on a dominant fire-atmospheric feedback mechanism, which we term wildland fire entrainment (…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fire Intensity and spRead forecAst (FIRA): A Machine Learning Based Fire Spread Prediction Model for Air Quality Forecasting Application
Year: 2025
Fire activities introduce hazardous impacts on the environment and public health by emitting various chemical species into the atmosphere. Most operational air quality forecast (AQF) models estimate smoke emissions based on the latest available satellite fire products, which may not represent real-time fire behaviors without considering fire spread. Hence, a novel machine learning (ML) based fire spread forecast model, the Fire Intensity and spRead forecAst (FIRA), is developed for AQF model applications. FIRA aims to improve the performance of AQF models by providing realistic, dynamic fire…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Short-term impacts of operational fuel treatments on modelled fire behaviour and effects in seasonally dry forests of British Columbia, Canada
Year: 2025
Background: In response to increasing risk of extreme wildfire across western North America, forest managers are proactively implementing fuel treatments.Aims: We assessed the efficacy of alternative combinations of thinning, pruning and residue fuel management to mitigate potential fire behaviour and effects in seasonally dry forests of interior British Columbia, Canada.Methods: Across five community forests, we measured stand attributes before and after fuel treatments in 2021 and 2022, then modelled fire behaviour and effects using the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Canada Under Fire – Drivers and Impacts of the Record-Breaking 2023 Wildfire Season
Year: 2024
The 2023 wildfire season in Canada was unprecedented in its scale and intensity. Spanning from late April to early November and extending across much of the forested regions of Canada, the season resulted in a record-breaking total area burned of approximately 15 million hectares, over seven times the historic national annual average. The impacts were profound with more than 200 communities evacuated (approximately 232,000 people), periods of dense smoke that caused significant public health concerns, and unprecedented demands on fire-fighting resources. The exceptional area burned can be…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Restoring frequent fire to dry conifer forests delays the decline of subalpine forests in the southwest United States under projected climate
Year: 2024
- In southwestern US forests, the combined impact of climate change and increased fuel loads due to more than a century of human-caused fire exclusion is leading to larger and more severe wildfires. Restoring frequent fire to dry conifer forests can mitigate high-severity fire risk, but the effects of these treatments on the vegetation composition and structure under projected climate change remain uncertain.
- We used a forest landscape model to assess the impact of thinning and prescribed burns in dry conifer forests across an elevation gradient, encompassing low-elevation…
Fire Effects and Fire Ecology, Fire History, Mixed-Conifer Management, Prescribed Burning, Restoration and Hazardous Fuel Reduction
Publication Type: Journal Article
Probabilistic Forecasting of Lightning Strikes over the Continental USA and Alaska: Model Development and Verification
Year: 2024
Lightning is responsible for the most area annually burned by wildfires in the extratropical region of the Northern Hemisphere. Hence, predicting the occurrence of wildfires requires reliable forecasting of the chance of cloud-to-ground lightning strikes during storms. Here, we describe the development and verification of a probabilistic lightning-strike algorithm running on a uniform 20 km grid over the continental USA and Alaska. This is the first and only high-resolution lightning forecasting model for North America derived from 29-year-long data records. The algorithm consists of a large…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Informing proactive wildfire management that benefits vulnerable communities and ecological values
Year: 2024
- In response to mounting wildfire risks, land managers across the country will need to dramatically increase proactive wildfire management (e.g. fuel and forest health treatments). While human communities vary widely in their vulnerability to the impacts of fire, these discrepancies have rarely informed prioritizations for wildfire mitigation treatments. The ecological values and ecosystem services provided by forests have also typically been secondary considerations.
- To identify locations across the conterminous US where proactive wildfire management is likely to be effective…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Five social and ethical considerations for using wildfire visualizations as a communication tool
Year: 2024
BackgroundIncreased use of visualizations as wildfire communication tools with public and professional audiences—particularly 3D videos and virtual or augmented reality—invites discussion of their ethical use in varied social and temporal contexts. Existing studies focus on the use of such visualizations prior to fire events and commonly use hypothetical scenarios intended to motivate proactive mitigation or explore decision-making, overlooking the insights that those who have already experienced fire events can provide to improve user engagement and understanding of wildfire…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Future fire events are likely to be worse than climate projections indicate – these are some of the reasons why
Year: 2024
BackgroundClimate projections signal longer fire seasons and an increase in the number of dangerous fire weather days for much of the world including Australia.AimsHere we argue that heatwaves, dynamic fire–atmosphere interactions and increased fuel availability caused by drought will amplify potential fire behaviour well beyond projections based on calculations of afternoon forest fire danger derived from climate models.MethodsWe review meteorological dynamics contributing to enhanced fire behaviour during heatwaves, drawing on examples of…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A Wildfire Progression Simulation and Risk-Rating Methodology for Power Grid Infrastructure
Year: 2024
As the frequency and intensity of power line-induced wildfires increase due to climate-, human- , and infrastructure-related risk drivers, maintaining power system resilience and reducing environmental impacts become increasingly crucial. This paper presents a comprehensive methodology to assess the susceptibility, vulnerability, and risk of power line-induced wildfires for lines and nodes in an electric grid. The methodology integrates a well-established wildfire spread simulator into power flow analysis through a set of analytical steps. The proposed approach is applied to a case study…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Drought triggers and sustains overnight fires in North America
Year: 2024
Overnight fires are emerging in North America with previously unknown drivers and implications. This notable phenomenon challenges the traditional understanding of the ‘active day, quiet night’ model of the diurnal fire cycle1,2,3 and current fire management practices4,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Western larch regeneration more sensitive to wildfire-related factors than seasonal climate variability
Year: 2024
To understand the impacts of changing climate and wildfire activity on conifer forests, we studied how wildfire and post-fire seasonal climate conditions influence western larch (Larix occidentalis) regeneration across its range in the northwestern US. We destructively sampled 1651 seedlings from 57 sites across 32 fires that burned at moderate or high severity between 2000 and 2015; sites were within 100 m of reproductively mature western larch. Using dendrochronological methods, we estimated germination years of seedlings to calculate annual recruitment rates. We used boosted…
Publication Type: Journal Article