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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 The database provides a listing of fire research publications relevant to Alaska and a venue for sharing unpublished agency reports and works in progress that are not normally found in the published literature.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 64

Hessburg
It's no secret that wildfires in the west have been drastically increasing in size and destructive power. But what, if anything, can be done about it? Join world-renown and award-winning USFS research ecologist Dr. Paul Hessburg as he explains how we got here and restores our…
Year: 2017
Type: Media
Source: FRAMES

Hessburg
We have all seen the news - hotter summers, and bigger, badder wildfires. What's going on? How did we get here? Paul tells a fast-paced story of western US forests - unintentionally yet massively changed by a century of management. He relates how these changes, coupled with a…
Year: 2017
Type: Media
Source: FRAMES

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

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

Young, Higuera, Abatzoglou, Duffy, Hu
Statistical models using historical observations are a critical tool for anticipating future fire regimes. A key uncertainty with these models is the ability to project outside the range of historical observations, often done when making future projections. Here we investigate…
Year: 2017
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Walker, Mack, Johnstone
Climate change has increased the occurrence, severity, and impact of disturbances on forested ecosystems worldwide, resulting in a need to identify factors that contribute to an ecosystem's resilience or capacity to recover from disturbance. Forest resilience to disturbance may…
Year: 2017
Type: Document
Source: TTRS

Freeman, Kobziar, Rose, Cropper
Prescribed fire is widely accepted as a conservation tool because fire is essential to the maintenance of native biodiversity in many terrestrial communities. Approaches to this land-management technique vary greatly among continents, and sharing knowledge internationally can…
Year: 2017
Type: Document
Source: TTRS

Brenkert-Smith, Meldrum, Champ, Barth
Wildfire and the threat it poses to society represents an example of the complex, dynamic relationship between social and ecological systems. Increasingly, wildfire adaptation is posited as a pathway to shift the approach to fire from a suppression paradigm that seeks to control…
Year: 2017
Type: Document
Source: TTRS

Balch, Bradley, Abatzoglou, Nagy, Fusco, Mahood
The economic and ecological costs of wildfire in the United States have risen substantially in recent decades. Although climate change has likely enabled a portion of the increase in wildfire activity, the direct role of people in increasing wildfire activity has been largely…
Year: 2017
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

Strader, Jandt, Jenkins, York, Ziel
Presented by Heidi Strader, Randi Jandt, Jenn Jenkins, Alison York and Robert Ziel. Optional webinar for AFSC remote sensing workshop presenters to introduce the Alaska fire management context. We will summarize the natural history of fire in the state, explain how fire…
Year: 2017
Type: Media
Source: FRAMES

Loehman
From the Spring 2017 AFSC Remote Sensing Workshop: Opportunities to Apply Remote Sensing in Boreal/Arctic Wildfire Management and Science.
Year: 2017
Type: Media
Source: FRAMES

Dendroecologists apply the principles and methods of tree-ring science to address ecological questions and resolve problems related to global environmental change. In this fast-growing field, tree rings are used to investigate forest development and succession, disturbance…
Year: 2017
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

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

This document summarizes the 2011 AFSC workshop. Topics discussed included boreal fire history datasets in Alaska, fire return intervals in boreal forests, the Probabilistic Fire Analysis System (PFAS), the Canadian Wildland Fire Strategy, impacts of changing tundra fire regimes…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES