Research Database
Displaying 101 - 120 of 172
Wildland Fire Science Needs in Oregon and Washington: Local and regional research availability, applications, and gaps
Year: 2019
The Northwest Fire Science Consortium (Consortium) works to accelerate the awareness, understanding, and adoption of wildland fire science by connecting users in the Pacific Northwest with the most useful resources available. These efforts require an ongoing understanding of how users access wildland fire science, the challenges and opportunities that they experience in using different types of research, and topics where more information is needed. Previous research, including a prior assessment by the Consortium in 2011,1 has highlighted the importance of local or regionally-relevant…
Publication Type: Report
Assessing relative differences in smoke exposure from prescribed, managed, and full suppression wildland fire
Year: 2019
A novel approach is presented to analyze smoke exposure and provide a metric to quantify health-related impacts. Our results support the current understanding that managing low-intensity fire for ecological benefit reduces exposure when compared to a high-intensity full suppression fire in the Sierra Nevada of California. More frequent use of fire provides an opportunity to mitigate smoke exposure for both individual events and future emission scenarios. The differences in relative exposure between high-intensity, low-intensity, and prescribed burn were significant (P value < 0.01).…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Evaluating Model Predictions of Fire Induced Tree Mortality Using Wildfire-Affected Forest Inventory Measurements
Year: 2019
Forest land managers rely on predictions of tree mortality generated from fire behavior models to identify stands for post-fire salvage and to design fuel reduction treatments that reduce mortality. A key challenge in improving the accuracy of these predictions is selecting appropriate wind and fuel moisture inputs. Our objective was to evaluate postfire mortality predictions using the Forest Vegetation Simulator Fire and Fuels Extension (FVS-FFE) to determine if using representative fire-weather data would improve prediction accuracy over two default weather scenarios. We used pre- and post-…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Factors Associated with Structure Loss in the 2013–2018 California Wildfires
Year: 2019
Tens of thousands of structures and hundreds of human lives have been lost in recent fire events throughout California. Given the potential for these types of wildfires to continue, the need to understand why and how structures are being destroyed has taken on a new level of urgency. We compiled and analyzed an extensive dataset of building inspectors’ reports documenting homeowner mitigation practices for more than 40,000 wildfire-exposed structures from 2013–2018. Comparing homes that survived fires to homes that were destroyed, we investigated the role of defensible space distance,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Spatial and temporal assessment of responder exposure to snag hazards in post-fire environments
Year: 2019
Researchers and managers increasingly recognize enterprise risk management as critical to addressing contemporary fire management challenges. Quantitative wildfire risk assessments contribute by parsing and mapping potentially contradictory positive and negative fire effects. However, these assessments disregard risks to fire responders because they only address social and ecological resources and assets. In this study, we begin to overcome this deficiency by using a novel modeling approach that integrates remote sensing, field inventories, imputation-based vegetation modeling, and empirical…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Advancing the Science of Wildland Fire Dynamics Using Process-Based Models
Year: 2018
As scientists and managers seek to understand fire behavior in conditions that extend beyond the limits of our current empirical models and prior experiences, they will need new tools that foster a more mechanistic understanding of the processes driving fire dynamics and effects. Here we suggest that process-based models are powerful research tools that are useful for investigating a large number of emerging questions in wildland fire sciences. These models can play a particularly important role in advancing our understanding, in part, because they allow their users to evaluate the potential…
Publication Type: Journal Article
High-severity fire: Evaluating its key drivers and mapping its probability across western US forests
Year: 2018
Wildland fire is a critical process in forests of the western United States (US). Variation in fire behavior, which is heavily influenced by fuel loading, terrain, weather, and vegetation type, leads to heterogeneity in fire severity across landscapes. The relative influence of these factors in driving fire severity, however, is poorly understood. Here, we explore the drivers of high-severity fire for forested ecoregions in the western US over the period 2002–2015. Fire severity was quantified using a satellite-inferred index of severity, the relativized burn ratio. For each ecoregion, we…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fire and tree death: understanding and improving modeling of fire-induced tree mortality
Year: 2018
Each year wildland fires kill and injure trees on millions of forested hectares globally, affecting plant and animal biodiversity, carbon storage, hydrologic processes, and ecosystem services. The underlying mechanisms of fire-caused tree mortality remain poorly understood, however, limiting the ability to accurately predict mortality and develop robust modeling applications, especially under novel future climates. Virtually all post-fire tree mortality prediction systems are based on the same underlying empirical model described in Ryan and Reinhardt (1988 Can. J. For. Res. 18 1291–7), which…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Embracing Complexity to Advance the Science of Wildland Fire Behavior
Year: 2018
Wildland fire behavior research has largely focused on the steady-state interactions between fuels and heat fluxes. Contemporary research is revealing new questions outside the bounds of this simplified approach. Here, we explore the complex interactions taking place beyond steady-state assumptions through acknowledging the manufactured separation of research disciplines in fire science and the dynamic interactions that unfold when these separations are removed. Through a series of examples spanning at least four research disciplines and three ranges of spatial scale, we illustrate that by…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The influence of fire history on soil nutrients and vegetation cover in mixed-severity fire regime forests of the eastern Olympic Peninsula, Washington, USA
Year: 2018
The rain shadow forests of the Olympic Peninsula exemplify a mixed-severity fire regime class in the midst of a highly productive landscape where spatial heterogeneity of fire severity may have significant implications for below and aboveground post-fire recovery. The purpose of this study was to quantify the impacts of wildfire on forest soil carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) pools and assess the relationship of pyrogenic carbon (PyC) to soil processes in this mixed-severity ecosystem. We established a 112-year fire chronosequence with nine similar forest stands ranging in time since lastfire (TSF…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The Weather Conditions for Desired Smoke Plumes at a FASMEE Burn Site
Year: 2018
Weather is an important factor that determines smoke development, which is essential information for planning smoke field measurements. This study identifies the synoptic systems that would favor to produce the desired smoke plumes for the Fire and Smoke Model Evaluation Experiment (FASMEE). Daysmoke and PB-Piedmont (PB-P) models are used to simulate smoke plume evolution during the day time and smoke drainage and fog formation during the nighttime for hypothetical prescribed burns on 5–8 February 2011 at the Stewart Army Base in the southeastern United States. Daysmoke simulation is…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Multitemporal LiDAR improves estimates of fire severity in forested landscapes
Year: 2018
Landsat-based fire severity maps have limited ecological resolution, which can hinder assessments of change to specific resources. Therefore, we evaluated the use of pre- and post-fire LiDAR, and combined LiDAR with Landsat-based relative differenced Normalized Burn Ratio (RdNBR) estimates, to increase the accuracy and resolution of basal area mortality estimation. We vertically segmented point clouds and performed model selection on spectral and spatial pre- and post-fire LiDAR metrics and their absolute differences. Our best multitemporal LiDAR model included change in mean intensity values…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Defining extreme wildfire events: Difficulties, challenges, and impacts
Year: 2018
Every year worldwide some extraordinary wildfires occur, overwhelming suppression capabilities, causing substantial damages, and often resulting in fatalities. Given their increasing frequency, there is a debate about how to address these wildfires with significant social impacts, but there is no agreement upon terminology to describe them. The concept of extreme wildfire event (EWE) has emerged to bring some coherence on this kind of events. It is increasingly used, often as a synonym of other terms related to wildfires of high intensity and size, but its definition remains elusive. The goal…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Pyro-Ecophysiology: Shifting the Paradigm of Live Wildland Fuel Research
Year: 2018
The most destructive wildland fires occur in mixtures of living and dead vegetation, yet very little attention has been given to the fundamental differences between factors that control their flammability. Historically, moisture content has been used to evaluate the relative flammability of live and dead fuels without considering major, unreported differences in the factors that control their variations across seasons and years. Physiological changes at both the leaf and whole plant level have the potential to explain ignition and fire behavior phenomena in live fuels that have been poorly…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A comparison of the US National Fire Danger Rating System (NFDRS) with recorded fire occurrence and final fire size
Year: 2018
Most previous research has assessed the ability of the National Fire Danger Rating System (NFDRS) to portray fire activity at either single sites or on small spatial scales, despite it being a nation-wide system. This study seeks to examine the relationships between a set of NFDRS fire danger indices (Fire Danger Ratings, Staffing Level and the Ignition Component) and measures of fire activity (fire occurrence and final fire size) across the entire conterminous US over an 8-year period. We reveal that different regions of the US display different levels of correspondence between each of the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Wildfire risk reduction in the United States: Leadership staff perceptions of local fire department roles and responsibilities
Year: 2018
As wildland fires have had increasing negative impacts on a range of human values, in many parts of the United States (U.S.) and around the world, collaborative risk reduction efforts among agencies, homeowners, and fire departments are needed to improve wildfire safety and mitigate risk. Using interview data from 46 senior officers from local fire departments around the U.S., we examine how leadership staff view their departments’ roles and responsibilities in wildfire risk reduction. Overall, our findings indicate that local fire personnel are often performing a variety of mitigation tasks…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A review of challenges to determining and demonstrating efficiency of large fire management
Year: 2017
Characterising the impacts of wildland fire and fire suppression is critical information for fire management decision-making. Here, we focus on decisions related to the rare larger and longer-duration fire events, where the scope and scale of decision-making can be far broader than initial response efforts, and where determining and demonstrating efficiency of strategies and actions can be particularly troublesome. We organise our review around key decision factors such as context, complexity, alternatives, consequences and uncertainty, and for illustration contrast fire management in…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Sustainability and wildland fire: The origins of Forest Service Wildland Fire Research
Year: 2017
On June 1, 2015, the Forest Service, an agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Branch of Research. Established in 1915 to centralize and elevate the pursuit of research throughout the agency, the Branch of Research focused on everything from silvicultural investigations conducted by the experiment stations to industrial studies and wood product improvement at the Madison, WI, Forest Products Laboratory. From its beginning, the branch oversaw ongoing research designed to develop insights, methods, and technologies to help foresters and land…
Publication Type: Report
Predicting post-fire tree mortality for 14 conifers in the Pacific Northwest, USA: Model evaluation, development, and thresholds
Year: 2017
Fire is a driving force in the North American landscape and predicting post-fire tree mortality is vital to land management. Post-fire tree mortality can have substantial economic and social impacts, and natural resource managers need reliable predictive methods to anticipate potential mortality following fire events. Current fire mortality models are limited to a few species and regions, notably Pinus ponderosa and Pseudotsuga menziesii in the western United States. The efficacy of existing mortality models to predict fire-induced tree mortality is central to effective forest management.…
Publication Type: Journal Article
NFPA’s Wildland/Urban Interface: Fire Department Wildfire Preparedness and Readiness Capabilities – Final Report
Year: 2017
The increasing frequency and intensity of wildland and wildland-urban interface (WUI) fires have become a significant concern in many parts of the United States and around the world. To address and manage this WUI fire risk, local fire departments around the country have begun to acquire the appropriate equipment and offer more training in wildfire response and suppression. There is also growing recognition of the importance of wildfire mitigation and public outreach about community risk reduction. Using survey and interview data from 46 senior officers from local fire departments around the…
decision making, management, wildland fire, Wildland-urban interface (WUI), fire suppression, adaptation
Publication Type: Report