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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 The database provides a listing of fire research publications relevant to Alaska and a venue for sharing unpublished agency reports and works in progress that are not normally found in the published literature.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 103

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

Guertin, Goodrich, Burns, Sheppard, Patel, Clifford, Unkrich, Kepner, Levick
Functionality has been incorporated into the Automated Geospatial Watershed Assessment Tool (AGWA) to assess the impacts of wildland fire on runoff and erosion. AGWA (https://www.epa.gov/water-research/automated-geospatial-watershed-assess... or www.tucson.ars.ag.gov/agwa) is a…
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

Schaefer, Magi
For this study, we characterized the dependence of fire counts (FCs) on soil moisture (SM) at global and sub-global scales using 15 years of remote sensing data. We argue that this mathematical relationship serves as an effective way to predict fire because it is a proxy for 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

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

McAndrew, Forgotson, Johnson, Delgado Arias
A joint U.S. Forest Service (USFS)–NASA Applications Workshop took place April 29–May 2, 2019. The USFS hosted the meeting at its Geospatial Technology and Applications Center (GTAC) in Salt Lake City, UT. This unique collaborative venture bought together representatives from…
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

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

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

Rogers, Cooperdock, Dieleman, Erb, Goetz, Johnstone, Mack, Moubarak, Phillips, Potter, Randerson, Schaaf, Solvik, Turetsky, Veraverbeke, Walker, Wiggins
Wildfires in the boreal forests and peatlands of the ABoVE domain are a natural disturbance agent, but are increasing in frequency and severity. Boreal forest fires impart relatively large forcings on the climate system as a result of (i) typically high severity fires that emit…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Bourgeau-Chavez, Jenkins, Hart, French, Poley, Tanzer, Bosse, McDonald
At three locations in the ABoVE domain in-situ data loggers have been installed since summer 2017 to obtain time series data on soil moisture and temperature across a variety of land cover types, including tundra, boreal peatlands, and boreal uplands. The percent Volumetric…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Bourgeau-Chavez, Graham, Battaglia, Kane, French, Grelik, Hanes
Our study aimed to integrate remote sensing, spatial analysis, and field data to understand the vulnerability and resiliency of peatlands and uplands to wildfire across the southern Northwest Territories study area where peatlands are abundant, including these objectives: • Map…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Bourgeau-Chavez, French, Battaglia, Billmire, Kane, Shuman, Swenson, Siqueira, Chapman, Hanes, Cantin, Whitman, Berg, Foster, Baltzer
Our goal was to improve understanding of the interactions of wildfire and hydrology (including permafrost changes) and the ensuing post-fire successional trajectories in both uplands and peatlands of the Artic-Boreal Zone (ABZ) in a changing climate. Objective 1: Develop…
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

Monedero, Ramírez, Cardil
Accurately predicting fire spread and behaviour on the fireline, in the field, is highly important in order to prevent the loss of human life, improve the success of initial attack and better understand the potential fire behaviour, minimizing many risks for firefighters. We…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Cardil, Monedero, Ramírez, Silva
Large wildfires can cover millions of hectares of forest every year worldwide, causing losses in ecosystems and assets. Fire simulation and modeling provides an analytical scheme to characterize and predict fire behavior and spread in several and complex environments. Spatial…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Rossi, Kuusela
The effectiveness of annual investments in US wildfire management programs has been subject to public criticism. One source of inefficiency may arise from a fragmented budgeting process. In the United States, federal budgets for wildfire management operations are not determined…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Pingree, Kobziar
Soil heating caused by prescribed or wildland fire commonly focuses on a single biological thermal threshold of 60 °C for the duration of one minute to represent organism death. This metric severely misrepresents the heterogeneity of the soil environment, the physiological…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Nguyen, Schlesinger, Han, Gür, Carlson
Quantifying factors that affect evacuation decision making remains a challenging task. Progress is crucial for developing predictive models of collective behavior and for designing effective policies to guide the action of populations during wildfires. We conduct a controlled…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Zhang, Collin, Moireau, Trouve, Rochoux
Data-driven wildfire spread modeling is emerging as a cornerstone for forecasting real-time fire behavior using thermal-infrared imaging data. One key challenge in data assimilation lies in the design of an adequate measure to represent the discrepancies between observed and…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES