175 Results Found

Managed wildfires, i.e., naturally ignited wildfires that are managed for resource benefits, have the potential to reduce fuel loads, minimize the effects of future wildfires, and restore critical natural processes across many forest landscapes. In t...

From August to October 2020, a serious wildfire occurred in California, USA, which produced a large number of particulate matter and harmful gases, resulting in huge economic losses and environmental pollution. Particulate matter delays the GNSS sign...

This study explores public discourse surrounding the January 2025 California wildfires by analyzing high-engagement YouTube comments. Leveraging sentiment analysis, misinformation detection, and topic modeling, this research identifies dominant emoti...

Recently, the United States has experienced, on average, costs of USD 20 billion due to natural and climate disasters, such as hurricanes and wildfires. In this study, we focus on wildfires, which have occurred more frequently in the past few years....

Wildfires have been affecting California greatly, and vulnerable patients in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) are not exempt. Our aim was to learn how personnel working in NICUs of California hospitals handled issues of neonatal transfer during...

The 2020 wildfire season was devastating to the Western United States and affected the region’s NICUs. In this study, we ask the question, “what tools/strategies do medical professionals deem as important and most helpful as they are preparing for wi...

As human impacts from wildfires mount, there is a pressing need to understand why structures are lost in destructive fires. Despite growing research on factors contributing to structure loss, fewer studies have focused on why some fires are destructi...

Massive wildfires and extreme fire behavior are becoming more frequent across the western United States, creating a need to better understand how megafire behavior will evolve in our warming world. Here, the fire spread model Prometheus is used to si...

The 2020 California wildfire season coincided with the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic affecting many counties in California, with impacts on air quality. We quantitatively analyzed the short-term effect of air pollution on COVID-19 transmission using...

Major wildfires and their smoke pose a threat to public health and are becoming more frequent in the United States, particularly in California and other populated, fire-prone states. Therefore, it is crucial to understand how California residents vie...

Wildfires can be detrimental to urban and rural communities, causing impacts in the form of psychological stress, direct physical injury, and smoke-related morbidity and mortality. This study examined the area burned by wildfires over the entire stat...

Between 2010 and 2020, an average of 36,037 hectares of grassland burned in wildfires in California each year, emitting greenhouse gasses (GHGs) and particulate matter (PM). These emissions impact climate and human health. Cattle grazing removes herb...

Worsening wildfire seasons in recent years are reversing decadal progress on the reduction of harmful air pollutants in the US, particularly in Western states. Measurements of the contributions of wildfire smoke to ambient air pollutants, such as fin...

Wildfires present a significant risk to societies globally due to population growth, concentrated activities, climate change, and extreme environmental conditions. To establish effective fire suppression and management policies, it is crucial to dete...

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 ha...

In this study, we investigate the emissions from wildfires in the mid latitude (California) and high latitude (Krasnoyarsk Krai) during the periods of 16–17 August 2020 and 28 July 2019, respectively. Wildfires are unique in themselves as they...

Wildfires can change ecosystems by altering solutes in streams. We examined major cations in streams draining a chaparral-dominated watershed in the Santa Ynez Mountains (California, USA) following a wildfire that burned 75 km2 from July 8 to October...

The San Joaquin Valley in California has some of the worst air quality conditions in the nation, affected by a variety of pollution sources including wildfires. Although wildfires are part of the regional ecology, recent increases in wildfire activit...

Natural disasters like wildfires pose significant threats to communities, which necessitates timely and effective disaster response strategies. While Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) has been widely used to extract sentiment-related information...

Catastrophic effects of wildfires on human lives and assets have increased the prominence of wildfire in the media and across the scientific community, and the phrase “the new normal” is now widely used to describe the growing magnitude o...

Machine learning and artificial intelligence models have become popular for climate change prediction. Forested regions in California and Western Australia are increasingly facing intense wildfires, while other parts of the world face various climate...

Damages caused by wildfires in California due to transmission line failures have increased significantly in recent years. Curtailment of electric service in areas under fire threat has been implemented to avoid these wildfires. Results from this rese...

Wildfires are a major hazard to humans in the southern California Mediterranean ecosystem and improving our understanding and delineation of different fire regimes is critical to mitigating wildfire-related hazards. Recent research has demonstrated t...

In 2020, wildfires scarred over 4,000,000 hectares in the western United States, devastating urban populations and ecosystems alike. The significant impact that wildfires have on plants, animals, and human environments makes wildfire adaptation, mana...

Using 100 years of fire perimeter maps, we investigate the existence of geographical patterns in fire orientation across California. We computed fire perimeter orientation, at the watershed level, using principal component analysis. Circular statisti...

Efforts to delineate the influence of atmospheric variability on regional wildfire activity have previously been complicated by the stochastic occurrence of ignition and large fire events, particularly for Southern California, where anthropogenic mod...

The increase in both the frequency and magnitude of natural disasters, coupled with recent advancements in artificial intelligence, has introduced prospects for investigating the potential of new technologies to facilitate disaster response processes...

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 chan...

Over the years, rampant wildfires have plagued the state of California, creating economic and environmental loss. In 2018, wildfires cost nearly 800 million dollars in economic loss and claimed more than 100 lives in California. Over 1.6 million acre...

The Rough Fire started on 31 July 2015 from a lightning strike, spread to over 61,000 ha and burned parts of the Sierra and Sequoia National Forests and the Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks, in California. Health advisories for smoke were is...

The goal of the research reported here is to assess the capability of satellite vegetation indices from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer onboard both Terra and Aqua satellites, in order to replicate live fuel moisture content of Sout...

Relationships between drought indices and fire danger outputs are examined to (1) incorporate fire risk information into the National Integrated Drought Information System California–Nevada Drought Early Warning System and (2) provide a baselin...

After the devastating wildfire that destroyed most of the town of Paradise, California in 2018, volatile organic compounds were found in water distribution pipes. Approximately 11 months after the fire, we collected tap water samples from 136 homes t...

In this study, we present a nationwide machine learning model for hourly PM2.5 estimation for the continental United States (US) using high temporal resolution Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES-16) Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) d...

In seasonally dry environments, the amount of water held in living plant tissue—live fuel moisture (LFM)—is central to vegetation flammability. LFM-driven changes in wildfire size and frequency are particularly important throughout southe...

California has experienced a surge in wildfires, prompting research into contributing factors, including weather and climate conditions. This study investigates the complex, multiscale interactions between large-scale climate patterns, such as the Bo...

This study examined the hydrological/meteorological controls on large wildfires > 10,000 acres (40.5 km2) during 2017–2020 in Northern California at spatial and temporal scales of the target wildfires’ occurrence or growth. This study...

On November 8, 2018, a devastating wildfire, known as the Camp Fire wildfire, was reported in Butte County, California, USA. Approximately 88 fatalities ensued, and 18,804 structures were damaged by the wildfire. As a response to this destructive wil...

Debate remains about the effectiveness of commercial thinning as a wildfire management strategy, with some studies reporting somewhat lower severity in thinned forests, and some reporting higher severity, during wildfires. However, while vegetation s...

Wildfires and their long-term impacts on the environment have become a major concern in the last few decades, in which climate change and enhanced anthropogenic activities have gradually led to increasingly frequent events of such hazards or disaster...

Studies pertaining to fire severity in commercially thinned versus unthinned forests are based on a comparison of tree mortality between the two categories. Commercial thinning is widely conducted on public and private forestlands as a fire managemen...

Major wildfires and heatwaves have begun to increase in frequency throughout much of the United States, particularly in western states such as California, causing increased risk to public health. Air pollution is exacerbated by both wildfires and war...

How wildfires are managed is a key determinant of long-term socioecological resiliency and the ability to live with fire. Safe and effective response to fire requires effective pre-fire planning, which is the main focus of this paper. We review gener...

California plans to substantially increase the use of prescribed fire to reduce risk of catastrophic wildfires. Although for a beneficial purpose, prescribed fire smoke may still pose a health concern, especially among sensitive populations. We sough...

Wildfires have a strong influence on various geotechnical and hydraulic properties of soils and sediments, which may become more vulnerable to landslides or debris flows. In the present study, a case investigation of the 2018 post-wildfire debris flo...

Extreme, downslope mountain winds often generate dangerous wildfire conditions. We used the wildfire spread model Fire Area Simulator (FARSITE) to simulate two wildfires influenced by strong wind events in Santa Barbara, CA. High spatial-resolution i...

Recent increases in destructive wildfires are driving a need for empirical research documenting factors that contribute to structure loss. Existing studies show that fire risk is complex and varies geographically, and the role of vegetation has been...

Hanson (2022) evaluated thinning as a management tool to reduce wildfire tree mortality using thinning history and fire mortality data from the Goosenest Adaptive Management Area (GAMA) in California. The combination of on-the-ground measurements of...

Eaton Canyon in California serves as the focal point for a comprehensive post-wildfire ecological impact assessment. This study employs an approach integrating satellite imagery from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel constellation to study a...

Light detection and ranging (Lidar) data can be used to create wall-to-wall forest structure and fuel products that are required for wildfire behavior simulation models. We know that Lidar-derived forest parameters have a non-negligible error associa...