Wildfire-potential information products are designed to support decisions for prefire staging of movable wildfire suppression resources across geographic locations.
Convective instability can influence the behaviour of large wildfires. Because wildfires modify the temperature and moisture of air in their plumes, instability calculations using ambient conditions may not accurately represent convective potential for some fire plumes.
Over 1200 post-fire assessment and treatment implementation reports from four decades (1970s–2000s) of western US forest fires have been examined to identify decadal patterns in fire characteristics and the justifications and expenditures for the post-fire treatments.
Climate change effects on forested ecosystems worldwide include increases in drought-related mortality, changes to disturbance regimes and shifts in species distributions. Such climate-induced changes will alter the outcomes of current management strategies, complicating the selection of appropriate strategies to promote forest resilience.
Effective wildfire management in the wildland–urban interface (WUI) depends on timely data on forest fuel loading to inform management decisions.
Very large wildfires can cause significant economic and environmental damage, including destruction of homes, adverse air quality, firefighting costs and even loss of life. We examine how climate is associated with very large wildland fires (VLWFs ≥50 000 acres, or ~20 234 ha) in the western contiguous USA.
Fire has largely been excluded from many mountain big sagebrush communities. Managers are reluctant to reintroduce fire, especially in communities without significant conifer encroachment, because of the decline in sagebrush-associated wildlife. Given this management direction, a better understanding of fire exclusion and burning effects is needed.
Fire-resilient landscapes require the recurrent use of fire, but successful use of fire in previously burned areas must account for temporal fuel dynamics. We analysed factors influencing temporal fuel dynamics across a 24-year spatial chronosequence of unmanipulated dry mixed conifer forests following high-severity fire.
Evaluating the influence of observed daily weather on observed fire-related effects (e.g. smoke production, carbon emissions and burn severity) often involves knowing exactly what day any given area has burned.
Over a century of fire exclusion in frequent-fire ponderosa pine and dry mixed conifer forests has resulted in increased tree densities, heavy surface fuel accumulations and an increase in late successional, fire-intolerant trees. Grand Canyon National Park uses prescribed fires and wildfires to reduce fire hazard and restore ecosystem processes.