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 The database provides a listing of fire research publications relevant to Alaska and a venue for sharing unpublished agency reports and works in progress that are not normally found in the published literature.
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Topic
Year
Displaying 1 - 25 of 64
Addressing wildfire is not simply a fire management, fire operations, or wildland-urban interface problem - it is a larger, more complex land management and societal issue. The vision for the next century is to: Safely and effectively extinguish fire, when needed; use fire where…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Brown, Johnstone
Fire frequency is expected to increase due to climate warming in many areas, particularly the boreal forests. An increase in fire frequency may have important effects on the global carbon cycle by decreasing the size of boreal carbon stores. Our objective was to quantify and…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES, TTRS
Heyerdahl, Lertzman, Wong
Historical fire severity is poorly characterized for dry forests in the interior west of North America. We inferred a multicentury history of fire severity from tree rings in Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii var. glauca (Beissn.) Franco) - ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa…
Year: 2012
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Wallenius
Steep decline in forest fires about a century ago occurred in coniferous forests over large areas in North America and Fennoscandia. This poorly understood phenomenon has been explained by different factors in different regions. The objective of this study is to evaluate the…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Soverel, Coops, Perrakis, Daniels, Gergel
Wildfire is a complex and critical ecological process that is an integral component of western Canadian terrestrial ecosystems. Therefore, Canadian land management agencies such as Parks Canada require detailed burn severity data for the monitoring and managing of both wildland…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES, TTRS
Parisien, Parks, Krawchuk, Flannigan, Bowman, Moritz
In the boreal forest of North America, as in any fire-prone biome, three environmental factors must coincide for a wildfire to occur: an ignition source, flammable vegetation, and weather that is conducive to fire. Despite recent advances, the relative importance of these…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Lewis, Hudak, Ottmar, Robichaud, Lentile, Hood, Cronan, Morgan
Wildfire is a major forest disturbance in interior Alaska that can both directly and indirectly alter ecological processes. We used a combination of pre- and post-fire forest floor depths and post-fire ground cover assessments measured in the field, and high-resolution airborne…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES, TTRS
Glick
From the text ... 'Welcome to the new era of 'megafires,' which rage with such intensity that no human force can put them out. Their main causes, climate change and fire suppression, are fueling a heated debate about how to stop them.'
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Haecker
From the Summary ... 'Exposure of a historic structure or object to fire, regardless of the temperature that is generated, does not necessarily equate with destroying its value as a cultural resource. For instance, a low-temperature prescribed fire that burns over a trash…
Year: 2012
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Deal
From Lithic Artifacts and Fire ... 'Artifacts made of stone are generally the best preserved of all material types in the archaeological record, often providing the only evidence of where people lived and worked in the past. Despite its durability, stone can be affected by fire…
Year: 2012
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Rocha, Loranty, Higuera, Mack, Hu, Jones, Breen, Rastetter, Goetz, Shaver
Recent large and frequent fires above the Alaskan arctic circle have forced a reassessment of the ecological and climatological importance of fire in arctic tundra ecosystems. Here we provide a general overview of the occurrence, distribution, and ecological and climate…
Year: 2012
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Barrier, Johnson
We used an information-theoretic model comparison approach to investigate the influence of forest stand attributes resulting from wildfire on the occupancy of winter habitats by barren-ground caribou (Rangifer tarandus groenlandicus) in the Northwest Territories, Canada. We used…
Year: 2012
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Brown, Johnstone
Widespread climate change is expected to lead to altered patterns of disturbance, thereby driving future ecosystem change. This interaction, which is often poorly recognized or understood, may be particularly important in the sub-arctic due to rapid climate change and frequent…
Year: 2012
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Penn
The combination of a gutted B.C. Forest Service, vast areas of not sufficiently restocked forest lands, a quirky loophole in the Kyoto Protocol and a provincial government ideologically driven to sell off public assets has created the perfect opportunity to burn down B.C.'s…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Ryan, Koerner
From the Conclusions ... 'Fires have impacted cultures for millennia and fire will continue to impact contemporary cultures as well as the remnants of past cultures. The challenge is to manage vagetation/fuels to minimize damage to contemporary cultures as well as the cultural…
Year: 2012
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Ryan, Koerner, Lee, Siefkin
From the text ... 'This volume is intended to be used as a reference for both cultural resource specialists and fire managers during their planning processes. The intended audience includes resource and fire managers employed by public, tribal, and private land management…
Year: 2012
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Rude, Jones
From the Conclusions ... 'Experimental studies focus mainly on the visual impacts of fire on potsherds. Fire effects on analytical properties of ceramics are less understood. Smoke blackening of sherds located at the ground surface is the most common fire effect noted. The…
Year: 2012
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Higuera, Barnes, Chipman, Urban, Hu
[from the text] More than 5.4 million acres (2.2 million hectares) of Alaska tundra have burned over the past 60 years (Figure 2), indicating its flammable nature under warm, dry weather conditions. Tundra fires have important impacts on vegetation composition (Racine et al.…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Olson, Cronan, McKenzie, Barnes, Camp
Wildland fires play a critical role in maintaining the ecological integrity of boreal forests in Alaska. Identifying and maintaining natural fire regimes is an important component of fire management. There are numerous research projects that directly or indirectly address…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Jiang, Zhuang
Large fires are a major disturbance in Canadian forests and exert significant effects on both the climate system and ecosystems. During the last century, extremely large fires accounted for the majority of Canadian burned area. By making an instaneous change over a vast area of…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES, TTRS
Rupp, Olson, Duffy
Interest in the emergence of graminoid vegetation as a dominant ecosystem type across Alaska has recently increased. This is due to both analysis of remotely sensed vegetation products and anecdotal observations from field work. This work serves as a component of a larger effort…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Bernhardt, Hollingsworth, Chapin
QUESTION: How do pre-fire conditions (community composition and environmental characteristics) and climate-driven disturbance characteristics (fire severity) affect post-fire community composition in black spruce stands? LOCATION: Northern boreal forest, interior Alaska. METHODS…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES, TTRS
In response to a recent criticism of the practice of prescription burning published in Trends in Plant Science, USGS scientist Jon Keeley and colleagues from Spain, South Africa and Australia contend that when applied within the context of a landscape's natural fire regime,…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Keeley
Introduction: Pinus is a diverse genus of trees widely distributed throughout the Northern Hemisphere. Understanding pine life history is critical to both conservation and fire management. Objectives: Here I lay out the different pathways of pine life history adaptation and a…
Year: 2012
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES, TTRS
The genus Pinus orginated 150 million years ago in the Mesozoic Era, when high fire activity was a likely driver of the evolutionary divergence for this group of conifers. In the Annals of Forest Science, USGS ecologist Jon Keeley has reviewed the evolution of pine life history…
Year: 2012
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES