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Sharing contracted resources for fire suppression: engine dispatch in the Northwestern United States

Year of Publication
2017
Publication Type

As demand for wildfire response resources grows across the globe, a central challenge is developing new and flexible systems and capacity to ensure that resources needed for fire response arrive when and where they are needed. Private contractors have become increasingly important in providing equipment and services to support agency wildfire suppression needs in the USA.

Warming weakens the night-time barrier to global fire

Year of Publication
2022
Publication Type

Night-time provides a critical window for slowing or extinguishing fires owing to the lower temperature and the lower vapour pressure deficit (VPD). However, fire danger is most often assessed based on daytime conditions1,2, capturing what promotes fire spread rather than what impedes fire.

Exposures and behavioural responses to wildfire smoke

Year of Publication
2022
Publication Type

Pollution from wildfires constitutes a growing source of poor air quality globally. To protect health, governments largely rely on citizens to limit their own wildfire smoke exposures, but the effectiveness of this strategy is hard to observe.

Pyrogenic carbon decomposition critical to resolving fire’s role in the Earth system

Year of Publication
2022
Publication Type

Recently identified post-fire carbon fluxes indicate that, to understand whether global fires represent a net carbon source or sink, one must consider both terrestrial carbon retention through pyrogenic carbon production and carbon losses via multiple pathways. Here these legacy source and sink pathways are quantified using a CMIP6 land surface model to estimate Earth’s fire carbon budget.

A collaborative agenda for archaeology and fire science

Year of Publication
2022
Publication Type

Humans have influenced global fire activity for millennia and will continue to do so into the future. Given the long-term interaction between humans and fire, we propose a collaborative research agenda linking archaeology and fire science that emphasizes the socioecological histories and consequences of anthropogenic fire in the development of fire management strategies today.