2018 June - 18 articles
Two extreme wind-driven wildfire events impacted California in late 2017, leading to 46 fatalities and thousands of structures lost. This study characterizes the meteorological and climatological factors that drove and enabled these wildfire events a...
Fuel, aridity, and ignition switches were all on in 2017, making it one of the largest and costliest wildfire years in the United States (U.S.) since national reporting began. Anthropogenic climate change helped flip on some of these switches rapidly...
In response to an increasing risk of property loss from wildfires at the urban–wildland interface[…]
Understanding wildfire rate of spread (RoS) is often a key objective of many fire behavior modelling and measurement exercises. Using instrumented moderate scale laboratory burns we provide an assessment of eight different methods of flame front RoS...
Vegetation flammability remains poorly defined and involves many intercorrelated components and metrics. Schwilk (2015) proposed a flammability framework with only two axes: total heat release and rate of spread. Pausas et al. (2017) modified this fr...
Appropriate categorisation and description of living vegetation and dead biomass is necessary to support the rising complexity of managing wildland fire and healthy ecosystems. We propose a hierarchical, physiognomy-based classification of wildland f...
Often missing or underdeveloped in wildland fire research is a clear sense of the link between contemporaneous political possibility and the desired ecological or management outcomes. We examine the disconnect between desired outcomes and what we cal...
Dendroecology is the science that dates tree rings to their exact calendar year of formation to study processes that influence forest ecology (e.g., Speer 2010 [1], Amoroso et al., 2017 [2]) [...]
The Cooney Ridge Fire Experiment conducted by fire scientists in 2003 was a burnout operation supported by a fire suppression crew on the active Cooney Ridge wildfire incident. The fire experiment included measurements of pre-fire fuels, active fire...
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 w...
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...
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A newer generation of models that interactively couple the atmosphere with fire behavior have shown an increased potential to understand and predict complex, rapidly changing fire behavior. This is possible if they capture intricate, time-varying mic...
Large, spatially explicit forest plots have the potential to address currently understudied aspects of fire ecology and management, including the validation of physics-based fire behavior models and next-generation fire effects models. Pre-fire fores...
Large fires account for the majority of burned area and are an important focus of fire management. However, ‘large’ is typically defined by a fire size threshold, minimizing the importance of proportionally large fires in less fire-prone ecoregions....
In the wildland-urban interface, the imperative is often to protect life and property from destructive fires, while also conserving biodiversity. One potential tool for achieving this goal is the use of green firebreaks: strips of low flammability sp...
One of the many unique features of the Earth is landscape-scale fire [1].[...]
I present the case for a fire-centric scholarship, and suggest the transition between burning living landscapes and lithic ones (in the form of fossil fuels) would make a good demonstration of what such scholarship might do and what its value could be.
