Research Database
Displaying 301 - 303 of 303
Expanding wildland-urban interface alters forest structure and landscape context in the northern United States
Year: 2022
The wildland-urban interface (WUI), where housing intermingles with wildland vegetation, is the fastest-growing land use type in the United States. Given the ecological and social benefits of forest ecosystems, there is a growing need to more fully understand how such development alters the landscape context and structure of these WUI forests. In a space-for-time analysis we utilized land cover data, forest inventory plots, and housing density data over time to examine differences in forest characteristics of the northern US across three WUI change classes: (a) forest that has been in WUI…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Summer and Fall Extreme Fire Weather Projected to Occur More Often and Affect a Growing Portion of California throughout the 21st Century
Year: 2022
Annual burned area has increased in California over the past three decades as a result of rising temperatures and a greater atmospheric demand for moisture, a trend that is projected to continue throughout the 21st century as a result of climate change. Here, we implement a bias-correction and statistical downscaling technique to obtain high resolution, daily meteorological conditions for input into two fire weather indices: vapor pressure deficit (VPD) and the Canadian Fire Weather Index System (FWI). We focus our analysis on 10 ecoregions that together account for the diverse range of…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Relationships between building features and wildfire damage in California, USA and Pedrógão Grande, Portugal
Year: 2022
Background: Buildings in communities near wildlands, in the wildland–urban interface (WUI), can experience wildfire damage.Aims: To quantitatively assess the relationship between building features and damage, a building wildfire resistance index is developed and validated with the 2013–2017 CAL FIRE (DINS) database from California, USA, and the 2017 Pedrógão Grande Fire Complex post-fire investigation from Portugal.Methods: Three statistical dependence tests are compared to evaluate the relationship between selected building features and…
Publication Type: Journal Article