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Fire : a very short introduction
\"Fire: A Very Short Introduction considers fire's four-hundred-million-year history, its chemical composition, its role in human development, and its different meanings, from heat and comfort to death and destruction. Fires in buildings regularly make the headlines, and news of wildfires now reaches our computer and smartphone screens. Urban and pastoral attitudes to fire can differ and formulating fire suppression policies can be complex. Two things have fundamentally altered our understanding; increased knowledge about fire in the deep time before human evolution, and the growth of satellite technology, which has transformed how we observe fire. In the context of our changing climate, an improved understanding of fire worldwide is urgently needed\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Prescribed fire science: the case for a refined research agenda
The realm of wildland fire science encompasses both wild and prescribed fires. Most of the research in the broader field has focused on wildfires, however, despite the prevalence of prescribed fires and demonstrated need for science to guide its application. We argue that prescribed fire science requires a fundamentally different approach to connecting related disciplines of physical, natural, and social sciences. We also posit that research aimed at questions relevant to prescribed fire will improve overall wildland fire science and stimulate the development of useful knowledge about managed wildfires. Because prescribed fires are increasingly promoted and applied for wildfire management and are intentionally ignited to meet policy and land manager objectives, a broader research agenda incorporating the unique features of prescribed fire is needed. We highlight the primary differences between prescribed fire science and wildfire science in the study of fuels, fire behavior, fire weather, fire effects, and fire social science. Wildfires managed for resource benefits (“managed wildfires”) offer a bridge for linking these science frameworks. A recognition of the unique science needs related to prescribed fire will be key to addressing the global challenge of managing wildland fire for long-term sustainability of natural resources.
Journal Article
Burning planet : the story of fire through time
Raging wildfires have devastated vast areas of California and Australia in recent years, and predictions are that we will see more of the same in coming years, as a result of climate change. But this is nothing new. Since the dawn of life on land, large-scale fires have played their part in shaping life on Earth. Andrew Scott tells the whole story of fire's impact on our planet's atmosphere, climate, vegetation, ecology, and the evolution of plant and animal life.-- Source other than Library of Congress.
Book
Between Two Fires
From a fire policy of prevention at all costs to today's restored
burning, Between Two Fires is America's history channeled
through the story of wildland fire management. Stephen J. Pyne
tells of a fire revolution that began in the 1960s as a reaction to
simple suppression and single-agency hegemony, and then matured
into more enlightened programs of fire management. It describes the
counterrevolution of the 1980s that stalled the movement, the
revival of reform after 1994, and the fire scene that has evolved
since then. Pyne is uniquely qualified to tell America's fire
story. The author of more than a score of books, he has told fire's
history in the United States, Australia, Canada, Europe, and the
Earth overall. In his earlier life, he spent fifteen seasons with
the North Rim Longshots at Grand Canyon National Park. In
Between Two Fires , Pyne recounts how, after the Great
Fires of 1910, a policy of fire suppression spread from America's
founding corps of foresters into a national policy that manifested
itself as a costly all-out war on fire. After fifty years of
attempted fire suppression, a revolution in thinking led to a more
pluralistic strategy for fire's restoration. The revolution
succeeded in displacing suppression as a sole strategy, but it has
failed to fully integrate fire and land management and has fallen
short of its goals. Today, the nation's backcountry and
increasingly its exurban fringe are threatened by larger and more
damaging burns, fire agencies are scrambling for funds,
firefighters continue to die, and the country seems unable to come
to grips with the fundamentals behind a rising tide of megafires.
Pyne has once again constructed a history of record that will shape
our next century of fire management. Between Two Fires is
a story of ideas, institutions, and fires. It's America's story
told through the nation's flames.
eBook
Empowering strategic decision-making for wildfire management: avoiding the fear trap and creating a resilient landscape
In recent years, fire services in Mediterranean Europe have been overwhelmed by extreme wildfire behavior. As a consequence, fire management has moved to defensive strategies with a focus only on the known risks (the fear trap). In this region, wildfires can change rapidly, increasing the uncertainty and causing complex operational scenarios that impact society right from the initial hours. To address this challenge, proactive approaches are an alternative to defensive and reactive strategies.
We propose a methodology that integrates the uncertainty of decisions and the cost of each opportunity into the strategic decision-making process. The methodology takes into account values such as fire-fighting safety, organizational resilience, landscape resilience, and social values.
Details of the methods and principles used to develop and implement a creative decision-making process that empower the fireline are provided. A tool that segregates the landscape into polygons of fire potential and defines the connectivity between those polygons is used. Two examples of operational implementation of this methodology are presented (2014 Tivissa Fire and 2015 Odena Fire).
These methods facilitate the analysis of possible scenarios of resolution and the costs of the opportunities that help build resilient emergency response systems and prevent their collapse. Moreover, they help explain the risk to society and involve citizens in the decision-making process. These methods are based on the experience and lessons learned by European incident commanders, managers, and researchers collected during the last decade.
Journal Article
Burning planet : the story of fire through time
Raging wildfires have devastated vast areas of California and Australia in recent years, and predictions are that we will see more of the same in coming years, as a result of climate change. But this is nothing new. Since the dawn of life on land, large-scale fires have played their part in shaping life on Earth. Andrew Scott tells the whole story of fire's impact on our planet's atmosphere, climate, vegetation, ecology, and the evolution of plant and animal life.
BOOK
Constraints on global fire activity vary across a resource gradient
We provide an empirical, global test of the varying constraints hypothesis, which predicts systematic heterogeneity in the relative importance of biomass resources to burn and atmospheric conditions suitable to burning (weather/climate) across a spatial gradient of long-term resource availability. Analyses were based on relationships between monthly global wildfire activity, soil moisture, and mid-tropospheric circulation data from 2001 to 2007, synthesized across a gradient of long-term averages in resources (net primary productivity), annual temperature, and terrestrial biome.
We demonstrate support for the varying constraints hypothesis, showing that, while key biophysical factors must coincide for wildfires to occur, the relative influence of resources to burn and moisture/weather conditions on fire activity shows predictable spatial patterns. In areas where resources are always available for burning during the fire season, such as subtropical/tropical biomes with mid-high annual long-term net primary productivity, fuel moisture conditions exert their strongest constraint on fire activity. In areas where resources are more limiting or variable, such as deserts, xeric shrublands, or grasslands/savannas, fuel moisture has a diminished constraint on wildfire, and metrics indicating availability of burnable fuels produced during the antecedent wet growing seasons reflect a more pronounced constraint on wildfire. This macro-scaled evidence for spatially varying constraints provides a synthesis with studies performed at local and regional scales, enhances our understanding of fire as a global process, and indicates how sensitivity to future changes in temperature and precipitation may differ across the world.
Journal Article
Extreme wildfire : smoke jumpers, high-tech gear, survival tactics, and the extraordinary science of fire
In this book, young readers will learn about the ecological impacts of wildfires, the ins and outs of fire science including tactics for prevention and containment, cutting-edge technology used to track wildfires and predict fire behavior, and about the impressive skill, survival tactics, and bravery required to control a wildfire.
Book
Climate, fire size, and biophysical setting control fire severity and spatial pattern in the northern Cascade Range, USA
Warmer and drier climate over the past few decades has brought larger fire sizes and increased annual area burned in forested ecosystems of western North America, and continued increases in annual area burned are expected due to climate change. As warming continues, fires may also increase in severity and produce larger contiguous patches of severely burned areas. We used remotely sensed burn-severity data from 125 fires in the northern Cascade Range of Washington, USA, to explore relationships between fire size, severity, and the spatial pattern of severity. We examined relationships between climate and the annual area burned and the size of wildfires over a 25-year period. We tested the hypothesis that increased fire size is commensurate with increased burn severity and increased spatial aggregation of severely burned areas. We also asked how local ecological controls might modulate these relationships by comparing results over the whole study area (the northern Cascade Range) to those from four ecological subsections within it. We found significant positive relationships between climate and fire size, and between fire size and the proportion of high severity and spatial-pattern metrics that quantify the spatial aggregation of high-severity areas within fires, but the strength and significance of these relationships varied among the four subsections. In areas with more contiguous subalpine forests and less complex topography, the proportion and spatial aggregation of severely burned areas were more strongly correlated with fire size. If fire sizes increase in a warming climate, changes in the extent, severity, and spatial pattern of fire regimes are likely to be more pronounced in higher-severity fire regimes with less complex topography and more continuous fuels.
Journal Article