Publications
The 2019 McKinley wildfire burned north of Wasilla during the driest summer on record. Lessons learned from the McKinley wildfire are shared in this outreach brochure with the goal of helping other Alaskans better prepare for future wildfire.
This AFSC Researh Brief reviews several recent papers, projects and conference presentations to gain a synthetic understanding of forest composition change in Alaska and whether the predicted shift toward hardwood forests is occurring.
Alaska's Changing Wildfire Environment s an outreach booklet that takes a broad look at how wildfire has been changing in the 21st in relation to climate change.
This AFSC research brief takes a look at early Alaska fire history from the 1940s. The "Zombie" Fires of 1942 is a historical narrative of an exceptional fire event releated to the Alaska Railroad, including an early description of a holdover fire burning over winter.
Alaska's Fire Environment: Not an Average Place is a compilation of excerpts from the keynote presentation given by Robert "Zeke" Ziel at the Albuquerque location of the 2019 Fire Behavior and Fuels Conference.
Alaska is nearly 18% of USA landmass. Its size is often unappreciated, as it’s frequently shown in whole without other states as reference.
Report from the three-day Remote Sensing workshop held at the University of Alaska Fairbanks from April 4-6, 2017. The interagency, international workshop was hosted by the Alaska Fire Science Consortium (AFSC) with funding from the NASA Applied Sciences Program to bring sciences users and producers together to explore new opportunities for applied remote sensing research in boreal and arctic fire management.
Trends in regional fire cycles for Alaska, 1943-2016, were analyzed by Thomas Paragi, Alaska Department of Fish & Game, Maija Wehmas, Alaska Fire Science Consortium, and David Verbyla, University of Alaska Fairbanks.
The research is highlighted in an AFSC research brief and accompanied by a detailed report with methodology/figures and tables.
GIS data and Python scripts from the project are available.
In this Research Brief, Robert Ziel highlights and defines different aspects concerning the science of fire hazard, potential, and risk to provide a concise handout that was made in conjunction to the 2019 Spring Fire Science Workshop by identifying the different fire potential assessment efforts and comparing them with the assessment tools available.
Caribou herds in North America seem to be declining. Is warming climate or it’s effects on habitat to blame? The relationship of caribou to lichen-rich winter ranges and fire is often oversimplified. Many factors besides habitat affect caribou numbers, which undergo large fluctuations naturally. In this Research Brief, we highlight recent publications on caribou-fire relationships and explore some of the factors that make it complicated to predict exactly what will happen and when if old-growth caribou habitats diminish with warming climate and more frequent burning.
It’s hard to keep up with the myriad investigations NASA ABoVE campaign is working on in Alaska. This short research brief is a round-up of recently published fire effects field studies and remote sensing products research and has some LINKS to show you where to access some intriguing new datasets and project results. The “Big Data” coming from ABoVE is going to be a big boost to conducting regional or state-wide fire trends and assessments–you’ll want to know where that data lives.