Skip to main content

The Alaska Reference Database originated as the standalone Alaska Fire Effects Reference Database, a ProCite reference database maintained by former BLM-Alaska Fire Service Fire Ecologist Randi Jandt. It was expanded under a Joint Fire Science Program grant for the FIREHouse project (The Northwest and Alaska Fire Research Clearinghouse). It is now maintained by the Alaska Fire Science Consortium and FRAMES, and is hosted through the FRAMES Resource Catalog. The database provides a listing of fire research publications relevant to Alaska and a venue for sharing unpublished agency reports and works in progress that are not normally found in the published literature.

Displaying 1 - 25 of 92

Cruz, Alexander
Dear Editor, In a paper published in the January 2016 issue of Fire Technology, Hoffman et al. provide an assessment of crown fire rate of spread predictions of two physics-based models, FIRETEC and the Wildland-urban interface Fire Dynamics Simulator (WFDS), through an indirect…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Alexander, Cruz
We have devised a rule of thumb for obtaining a first approximation of a fire’s spread rate that wildland fire operations personnel may find valuable in certain situations. It is based on the premise that under certain conditions wind speed is the dominant factor in determining…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Boschetti, Roy, Giglio, Huang, Zubkova, Humber
This paper presents a Stage 3 validation of the recently released Collection 6 NASA MCD64A1 500 m global burned area product. The product is validated by comparison with Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) image pairs acquired 16 days apart that were visually interpreted.…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Wang, ZhG, Zhang, Jin, Leung
Multispectral imaging (MI) provides important information for burned-area mapping. Due to the severe conditions of burned areas and the limitations of sensors, the resolution of collected multispectral images is sometimes very rough, hindering the accurate determination of…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Shinohara, Matsushima
Laboratory experiments were conducted to determine whether stationary fire whirls just downwind of a meter-scale turbulent flame are the lowest part of the counter-rotating vortex pair (CVP) of the plume from the flame. Plumes from a turbulent pool fire and air flow around the…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Wagenbrenner, Forthofer, Page, Butler
An open source computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solver has been incorporated into the WindNinja modeling framework. WindNinja is widely used by wildland fire managers, as well as researchers and practitioners in other fields, such as wind energy, wind erosion, and search and…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Powers, Bresch, Schwartz, Coen, Sobash
Abrupt changes in wind direction and speed can dramatically impact wildfire development and spread. Most importantly, such changes can pose significant problems to firefighting efforts and have resulted in a number of fire fatalities over the years. Frequent causes of such wind…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Blunck, Butler, Bailey, Wagenbrenner
Spot fires caused by lofted embers (i.e., firebrands) can be a significant factor in the spread of wildland fires. Embers can be especially dangerous near the wildland urban interface (WUI) because of the potential for the fire to be spread near or among structures. Many studies…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Artés, Oom, de Rigo, Houston Durrant, Maianti, Libertà, SanMiguel-Ayanz
Global fire monitoring systems are crucial to study fire behaviour, fire regimes and their impact at the global scale. Although global fire products based on the use of Earth Observation satellites exist, most remote sensing products only partially cover the requirements for…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Prichard, Kennedy, Andreu, Eagle, French, Billmire
Biomass mapping is used in variety of applications including carbon assessments, emission inventories, and wildland fire and fuel planning. Single values are often applied to individual pixels to represent biomass of classified vegetation, but each biomass estimate has…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Belval, Wei, Bevers
Wildland firefighting requires managers to make decisions in complex decision environments that hold many uncertainties; these decisions need to be adapted dynamically over time as fire behavior evolves. Models used in firefighting decisions should also have the capability to…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Steblein, Miller, Soileau
The U.S. Geological Survey's Wildland Fire Science Program produces fundamental information to identify the causes of wildfires, understand the impacts and benefits of both wildfires and prescribed fires, and help prevent and manage larger, catastrophic events. Our fire…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Moore
Purpose of Review: This review is on global wildland fire management research needs from the standpoint of 'integrated fire management'. It seeks to apply a characterisation of fires to frame research needs, and also recognise some differences in research needs between 'normal…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Caton-Kerr, Tohidi, Gollner
During wildland fires, firebrands form once they break off of burning vegetation or structures. Many are then lofted into the fire plume where they are transported long distances ahead of the fire front, igniting new “spot” fires as they land. To date, very few studies have been…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Hedayati, Bahrani, Zhou, Quarles, Gorham
Generation of firebrands from various fuels has been well-studied in the past decade. Limited details have been released about the methodology for characterizing firebrands such as the proper sample size and the measurement process. This study focuses on (1) finding the minimum…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Hudson, Blunck
Spot fires caused by lofted embers (i.e. firebrands) can be a significant factor in the spread of wildfires. Embers can be especially dangerous near the wildland-urban interface (WUI) because of the potential for the fire to be spread near or on structures. This work sought to…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Parisien, Dawe, Miller, Stockdale, Armitage
Wildland fire scientists and land managers working in fire-prone areas require spatial estimates of wildfire potential. To fulfill this need, a simulation-modelling approach was developed whereby multiple individual wildfires are modelled in an iterative fashion across a…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Coffield, Graff, Chen, Smyth, Foufoula-Georgiou, Randerson
Fires in boreal forests of Alaska are changing, threatening human health and ecosystems. Given expected increases in fire activity with climate warming, insight into the controls on fire size from the time of ignition is necessary. Such insight may be increasingly useful for…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Overall, drought conditions had improved across the Southern Area Geographic Area over the past two years. During the spring of 2015 drought conditions began establishing across Southern Appalachian mountain states and steadily spread and increased in severity through the fall…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Most regions of the United States are projected to experience a higher frequency of severe droughts and longer dry periods as a result of a warming climate. Even if current drought regimes remain unchanged, higher temperatures will interact with drought to exacerbate moisture…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Ottmar, Larkin, Brown, French
The Joint Fire Science Program (JFSP) and the Environmental Security Technology Certification Program (ESTCP) initiated the Fire and Smoke Model Experiment (FASMEE) (https://sites.google.com/firenet.gov/fasmee/) by funding Project 15-S-01-01 to identify and collect a set of…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Page, Butler
Wildland firefighters work in complex and dynamic environments, with many dangers that pose serious threats to their safety. Falling snags and rocks, steep and rugged terrain, and rapid increases in fire behavior are just some of the dangers that affect wildland firefighters.…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Christiansen
Historically, wildland fire fundamentally shaped the American landscape, and it continues to do so today in a highly modified environment. Forest, brush, and range fires were common in 'presettlement' times, and the American Indians realized the important role fire played in…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Abatzoglou, Williams, Barbero
Changes in global fire activity are influenced by a multitude of factors including land‐cover change, policies, and climatic conditions. This study uses 17 climate models to evaluate when changes in fire weather, as realized through the Fire Weather Index, emerge from the…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Ziel
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…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES