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 The database provides a listing of fire research publications relevant to Alaska and a venue for sharing unpublished agency reports and works in progress that are not normally found in the published literature.

Type

Topic

Year

Displaying 1 - 25 of 40

Mann Gulch Fire: a race that couldn't be won

Rothermel
The Mann Gulch fire, which overran 16 firefighters in 1949, is analyzed to show its probable movement with respect to the crew. The firefighters were smoke-jumpers who had parachuted near the fire on August 5, 1949. While they were moving to a safer location, the fire blocked…
Year: 1993
Type: Document
Source: TTRS

Regional climate change in the southern United States: the implications for wildfire occurrence

Heilman, Potter, Zerbe
From the Summary (p.697-698) ... 'Given the importance of wildfires in the south-central and southeastern United States, as reflected in the yearly totals of wildfire numbers and hectares burned, there is a need to better understand the potential ramifications of a changed…
Year: 1998
Type: Document
Source: TTRS

The effects of climate change on landscape diversity: an example in Ontario forests

Thompson, Flannigan, Wotton, Suffling
The predicted increase in climate warming will have profound impacts on forest ecosystems and landscapes in Canada because of increased temperature, and altered disturbance regimes. Climate change is predicted to be variable within Canada, and to cause considerable weather…
Year: 1998
Type: Document
Source: TTRS

Assessment of 1997 land and forest fires in Indonesia: national coordination

Makarim, Arbai, Deddy, Brady
The report describes the 1997 land and forest fires in Indonesia, reviews of the control measures put in place and evaluates the national coordination efforts taken to combat the fires as the dry period extended toward what became a serious drought. A key finding is that…
Year: 1998
Type: Document
Source: TTRS

Stand structure and crown fire risk in eastside forest riparian zones [abstract]

Williamson, Agee
Poster abstract...Riparian vegetation is often assumed to be less flammable than upland vegetation in evaluations of fire hazard in the eastern Cascades and Blue Mountains. However, the complex multi-layered structure and high proportion of fire-sensitive species within riparian…
Year: 1998
Type: Document
Source: TTRS

Landscape patterns and legacies resulting from large, infrequent forest disturbances

Foster, Knight, Franklin
We review and compare well-studied examples of five large, infrequent disturbances (LIDs)--fire, hurricanes, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, and floods--in terms of the physical processes involved, the damage patterns they create in forested landscapes, and the potential impacts…
Year: 1998
Type: Document
Source: TTRS

Compounded perturbations yield ecological surprises

Paine, Tegner, Johnson
All species have evolved in the presence of disturbance, and thus are in a sense matched to the recurrence pattern of the perturbations. Consequently, disturbances within the typical range, even at the extreme of that range as defined by large, infrequent disturbances (LIDs),…
Year: 1998
Type: Document
Source: TTRS

Wildfires in the western Canadian boreal forest: landscape patterns and ecosystem management

Johnson, Miyanishi, Weir
Mimicking of natural disturbance for ecosystem management requires an understanding of the disturbance processes and the resulting landscape patterns. Since fire is the major disturbance in the boreal forest, three widely held beliefs about fire behavior and resulting landscape…
Year: 1998
Type: Document
Source: TTRS

Spatio-temporal patterns of large grassland fires in the Intermountain West, U.S.A

Knapp
The spatial and temporal occurrence of large grassland fires (>2008 ha) in the Intermountain West was examined for the period 1980 through 1995. Results suggest that these fires are largely predictable through space and time. Of the 360 large fires, 339 occurred within eight…
Year: 1998
Type: Document
Source: TTRS

Fire temperatures in plant communities of the northern mixed prairie

Archibold, Nelson, Ripley, Delanoy
Temperatures during prescribed spring burns were monitored for selected mixed prairie plant communities near Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. In fescue, spear grass, and brome communities the fires peaked quickly at an average maximum temperature of approximately 500oC, then reverted to…
Year: 1998
Type: Document
Source: TTRS

Does clear-cutting alter avian distributions? A multiscale, landscape approach [abstract]

Gurd, Nudds
In the boreal forest, fires, insect outbreaks, and severe weather are thought to be the main disturbance sources which revert late successional forests to earlier stages. At the landscape scale, these disturbance processes create a habitat mosaic which supports many types of…
Year: 1998
Type: Document
Source: TTRS

Fire potential evaluation in support of prescribed fire risk assessment

Andrews, Williams
Increased use of prescribed fire requires an expansion of the current capabilities of decision support systems. In this paper we describe influencing factors that must be included to assess potential fire severity and risk of escape of prescribed fire, capabilities and…
Year: 1998
Type: Document
Source: TTRS

Modeling large forests as extreme events

Alvarado, Sandberg, Pickford
[no description entered]
Year: 1998
Type: Document
Source: TTRS

The use of fractal dimension to improve wildland fire perimeter predictions

McAlpine, Wotton
Fire managers currently use simple elliptical models to predict the perimeter of a fire when the fire starts from a single point. However, when examined closely wildland fire perimeters are highly irregular. We tested the hypothesis that a fire is actually fractal in nature and…
Year: 1993
Type: Document
Source: TTRS

Low-level weather conditions preceding major wildfires

Brotak
Knowledge of fire behavior is critical for those who control wildfires. Fire managers must know spread rates and intensity-not just to eventually contain and extinguish the fire but also to keep their fire control personnel safe. Managers realize that weather is paramount in…
Year: 1993
Type: Document
Source: TTRS

Prescribed burning of ponderosa pine red slash on the Gila National Forest

Orozco, Carrillo
Traditionally, in the Southwest, ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) red slash has not been treated with fire to meet resource objectives until all slash has fully cured, usually a 2-to-4-year wait. Waiting for slash to cure is still the widespread practice on most forests in the…
Year: 1993
Type: Document
Source: TTRS

Length of a fire season in a changing climate

Wotton, Flannigan
The Canadian Climate Centre's General Circulation Model provides two 10-year data sets of simulated daily weather for a large array of gridpoints across North America. A subset of this data, comprised of only those points within the forested part of Canada, was selected for…
Year: 1993
Type: Document
Source: TTRS

Probability of fire-stopping precipitation events

Latham, Rothermel
Fire managers in the Northwestern United States are often confronted by the problem of determining when precipitation might stop an ongoing fire. The possibility that a useful probability for fire-stopping precipitation could be developed from historical weather records was…
Year: 1993
Type: Document
Source: TTRS

A method to initialize the Keetch-Byram Drought Index

Burgan
The 1988 National Fire Danger System implements the Keetch-Byran Drought Index. This indexis output both as an estimator of drought in its own right and is used to modify fire danger calculations to account for deep drying of dead vefetation and duff. A method initializes this…
Year: 1993
Type: Document
Source: TTRS

The relative importance of fuels and weather on fire behavior in subalpine forests of the southern Canadian Rockies [abstract]

Bessie, Johnson
Surface fire intensity (kW m[-1]) and crown fire initiation were predicted using Rothermel's (1972) and Van Wagner's (1977) models, with fuel data from 47 subalpine conifer stands and 35 years of daily weather (moisture contents and windspeeds). Rothermel's intensity equations…
Year: 1993
Type: Document
Source: TTRS

Characteristics of arctic synoptic activity, 1952-1989

Serreze, Box, Barry, Walsh
Synoptic activity for the Arctic is examined for the period 1952-1989 using the National Meteorological Center sea level pressure data set. Winter cyclone activity is most common near Iceland, between Svalbard and Scandinavia, the Norwegian and Kara seas, Baffin Bay and the…
Year: 1993
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Atmospheric circulation patterns and spatial climatic variations in Beringia

Mock, Bartlein, Anderson
Analyses of more than 40 years of climatic data reveal intriguing spatial variations in climatic patterns for Beringia (North-eastern Siberia and Alaska), aiding the understanding of the hierarchy of climatic controls that operate at different spatial scales within the Arctic. A…
Year: 1998
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Paleoclimate simulations for North America over the past 21,000 years: features of the simulated climate and comparisons with paleoenvironmental data

Bartlein, Anderson, Anderson, Edwards, Mock, Thompson, Webb, Webb, Whitlock
Maps of upper-level and surface winds and of surface temperature and precipitation illustrate the results of a sequence of global paleoclimatic simulations spanning the past 21,000 yr for North America. We review (a) the large-scale features of circulation, temperature, and…
Year: 1998
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

The speed of a fire front and its dependence on wind-speed

Beer
The results of a number of laboratory tests of wind-driven fires indicate the existence of a characteristic wind speed, U'. The form of the fire spread (V) as a function of mid-flame wind speed (U) differs above and below this characteristic speed. The scatter in field data is…
Year: 1993
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Cloud dynamics

Houze, Jr.
Cloud dynamics [This publication is referenced in the "Synthesis of knowledge of extreme fire behavior: volume I for fire managers" (Werth et al 2011).]
Year: 1993
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES