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 The database provides a listing of fire research publications relevant to Alaska and a venue for sharing unpublished agency reports and works in progress that are not normally found in the published literature.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 207

Alexander, Thorburn
As an acronym, LACES stands for Lookout(s) - Anchor point(s) - Communication(s) - Escape routes - Safety zone(s) and has gradually become a guideline for wildland firefighter safety in various regions of Canada over the past 15 years or so. LACES constitutes a slight…
Year: 2015
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Heilman, Tang, Luo, Zhong, Winkler, Bian
From the text ... 'Researchers at Michigan State University and the Forest Services's Northern Research Station worked on a joint study to examine the possible effects of future global and regional climate change on the occurrence of fire-weather patterns often associated with…
Year: 2015
Type: Document
Source: TTRS

Liu, Hussaini, Okten
Rothermel's wildland surface fire spread model is widely used in North America. The model outputs depend on a number of input parameters, which can be broadly categorized as fuel model, fuel moisture, terrain, and wind parameters. Due to the inevitable presence of uncertainty in…
Year: 2015
Type: Document
Source: TTRS

Finney, Cohen, Forthofer, McAllister, Gollner, Gorham, Saito, Akafuah, Adam, English
Large wildfires of increasing frequency and severity threaten local populations and natural resources and contribute carbon emissions into the earth-climate system. Although wildfires have been researched and modeled for decades, no verifiable physical theory of spread is…
Year: 2015
Type: Document
Source: TTRS

Duff, Tolhurst
Wildfires are an inherent part of the landscape in many parts of the world; however, they often impose substantial economic burdens on human populations where they occur, both in terms of impacts and of management costs. As wildfires burn towards human assets, a universal…
Year: 2015
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES, TTRS

Sullivan, Sharples, Matthews, Plucinski
There is currently no fundamental understanding of the effects of topography on the behaviour of fires burning over a landscape. While a number of empirical models are employed operationally around the world, the effects of negative slopes on fire spread are ignored in all but…
Year: 2014
Type: Document
Source: TTRS

Mueller, Mell, Simeoni
Large eddy simulation (LES) based computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulators have obtained increasing attention in the wildland fire research community, as these tools allow the inclusion of important driving physics. However, due to the complexity of the models, individual…
Year: 2014
Type: Document
Source: TTRS

Liu, Jimenez, Hussaini, Okten, Goodrick
Rothermel's wildland surface fire model is a popular model used in wildland fire management. The original model has a large number of parameters, making uncertainty quantification challenging. In this paper, we use variance-based global sensitivity analysis to reduce the number…
Year: 2015
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES, TTRS

Fox, Whitesides
Spreading fires are noisy (and potentially chaotic) systems in which transitions in dynamics are notoriously difficult to predict. As flames move through spatially heterogeneous environments, sudden shifts in temperature, wind, or topography can generate combustion instabilities…
Year: 2015
Type: Document
Source: TTRS

Smurthwaite
From the text ... 'What does the future of rangelands and wildfire look like? The easy answer to the question is that rangelands will look different in the future and so will wildfire occurrence and behavior.'
Year: 2015
Type: Document
Source: TTRS

Sullivan, McDonald
Current practices for measuring high heat flux in scenarios such as wildland forest fires use expensive, thermopile-based sensors, coupled with mathematical models based on a semi-infinite-length scale. Although these sensors are acceptable for experimental testing in…
Year: 2014
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES, TTRS

Stephens, Burrows, Buyantuyev, Gray, Keane, Kubian, Liu, Seijo, Shu, Tolhurst, van Wagtendonk
Mega-fires are often defined according to their size and intensity but are more accurately described by their socioeconomic impacts. Three factors -- climate change, fire exclusion, and antecedent disturbance, collectively referred to as the 'mega-fire triangle' -- likely…
Year: 2014
Type: Document
Source: TTRS

Preisler
From the text ... 'In this special issue, we present a collection of papers that tackle some of the statistical issues concerned with characterizing wildfires and wildfire risk. These range from the issue of predicting locations and sizes of wildland fires at a landscape level…
Year: 2014
Type: Document
Source: TTRS

Krause, Kloster, Wilkenskjeld, Paeth
In this study, components of the Max Planck Institute Earth System Model were used to explore how changes in lightning induced by climate change alter wildfire activity. To investigate how climate change alters global flash frequency, simulations with the atmospheric general…
Year: 2014
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Kobziar
From the text ... 'Fire on Earth: An Introduction's four sections are intended to stand alone, yet motivate intratext interest. References to other sections appear organically throughout, and invite bouts of rapid page-turning. In the preface, the authors also prepare the reader…
Year: 2014
Type: Document
Source: TTRS

Beatty, Smith
Dynamic soil water repellency is a pending challenge in water repellency research. The dynamic change or temporal dependence of repellency is commonly expressed as the persistence of repellency. Persistence, or dynamic changes in contact angle, are however, difficult to directly…
Year: 2014
Type: Document
Source: TTRS

Keane, Dillon, Drury, Innes, Morgan, Lutes, Prichard, Smith, Strand
From the introduction ... 'Announcing the release of new software packages for application in wildland fire science and management, two fields that are already fully saturated with computer technology, may seem a bit too much to many managers. However, there have been some…
Year: 2014
Type: Document
Source: TTRS

Cruz, Alexander
From the text ... 'Operational guides for predicting various aspects of wildland fire behavior, including crowning, are generally dependent on mathematical models that can take a variety of forms. The degree of accuracy in predictions of crown fire behavior is dependent on the…
Year: 2014
Type: Document
Source: TTRS

Alexander, Cruz, Vaillant
From the text ... 'Wildland fire research has done much to contribute to our current understanding of the behavior of crowning forest fires through laboratory experiments, outdoor experimental burning, numerical modeling, and wildfire case histories. Presumably, the future holds…
Year: 2014
Type: Document
Source: TTRS

Alexander, Cruz
From the text ... 'Wind-driven surface and crown fires in conifer forests typically adopt a roughly elliptical shape.Area burned is proportional to the rate of spread increase (following the transition to crowning) to the power of 2.'
Year: 2014
Type: Document
Source: TTRS

[Preface to this full issue of Fire Management Today] Mass media images of raging crown fires have affected how many people view their wildlands. Flames surge and leap dozens and even hundreds of feet into the air; planes zoom above the flames releasing streams of brightly…
Year: 2014
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Cruz, Alexander
This paper highlights the results obtained from a comprehensive survey recently published by the authors on the error statistics associated with studies that have used independent data derived from field observations of wildfires, prescribed fires and experimental fires to…
Year: 2014
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Based primarily on the Canadian Forest Fire Danger Rating System (CFFDRS) component parts, the Fire Weather Index (FWI) System and the Fire Behavior Prediction (FBP) System, this document can be used to guide learning users through the fire behavior assessment process from the…
Year: 2015
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

This guide is intended as a reference for US users who may have reason to work with the system in the United States, where English units are primarily used. Keep in mind that the Canadian Forest Service has produced the definitive selection of reference publications and tools…
Year: 2015
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Ziel
Robert "Zeke" Ziel, a long-term analyst and fire behavior specialist for the State of Alaska, Zeke gives an overview of the past and current tools used in Alaska (and elsewhere) for Landscape Risk Assessment and exposure to wildfire. Modeling is more art than science in that the…
Year: 2015
Type: Media
Source: FRAMES