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 The database provides a listing of fire research publications relevant to Alaska and a venue for sharing unpublished agency reports and works in progress that are not normally found in the published literature.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 118
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
Zinck, Pascual, Grimm
Ecosystems driven by wildfire regimes are characterized by fire size distributions resembling power laws. Existing models produce power laws, but their predicted exponents are too high and fail to capture the exponent's variation with geographic region. Here we present a minimal…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Zhang
The MOPITT (Measurements Of Pollution In The Troposphere) CO measurements over a 10-year period (2000-2009) reveal consistently positive trends on the order of 0.13-0.19 x 1016 mol cm-2 per month in CO total column concentrations over the entire globe and the hemispheres. Two…
Year: 2011
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
Thomson, Rose
Introduction: Environmental contaminants are groups of unwanted, ubiquitous chemicals, found in food via weathering of the earth's crust, combustion (natural or anthropogenic), industrial uses or as unwanted bi-products of manufacturing processes. Evidence suggests that the…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Seidl, Fernandes, Fonseca, Gillet, Jönsson, Merganicova, Netherer, Arpaci, Bontemps, Bugmann, González-Olabarria, Lasch, Meredieu, Moreira, Schelhaas, Mohren
Natural disturbances play a key role in ecosystem dynamics and are important factors for sustainable forest ecosystem management. Quantitative models are frequently employed to tackle the complexities associated with disturbance processes. Here we review the wide variety of…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: 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
Johnstone, Rupp, Olson, Verbyla
Much of the boreal forest in western North America and Alaska experiences frequent, stand-replacing wildfires. Secondary succession after fire initiates most forest stands and variations in fire characteristics can have strong effects on pathways of succession. Variations in…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: 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
Daniels, Maertens, Stan, McCloskey, Cochrane, Gray
Climate is an important driver of forest dynamics. In this paper, we present three case studies from the forests of British Columbia to illustrate the direct and indirect effects of climatic variation and global warming on forest composition and function. (1) Tree mortality…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Abatzoglou, Kolden
Efforts to quantify relationships between climate and wildfire in Alaska have not yet explored the role of higher-frequency meteorological conditions on individual wildfire ignition and growth. To address this gap, meteorological data for 665 large fires that burned across the…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES, TTRS
Postfire energy exchange in arctic tundra: the importance and climatic implications of burn severity
Fires produce land cover changes that have consequences for surface energy balance and temperature. Three eddy covariance towers were setup along a burn severity gradient (i.e. Severely, Moderately, and Unburned tundra) to determine the effect of fire and burn severity on arctic…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Brown, Murphy
Discussions with fire-weather forecasters and their responses to the questionnaire revealed that SFWF's for prescribed burns typically include forecasts for the planned ignition time and three twelve-hour periods as well as a long-range outlook, and that SFWF's are usually…
Year: 1984
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Van Wagner
From the Conclusion: 'The ultimate justification for conducting research on forest fire is a) that it is a complex natural phenomenon with both physical and biological dimensions, b) that it can only be described and understood through scientific investigation, c) that it…
Year: 1984
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Lait
Text: 'Fire suppression offers the fire manager little or no time to prepare personnel for tasks which require considerable logistical preparation. Usually these aspects such as air tanker loading and retardant mixing are contracted out and are very expensive. Techniques such as…
Year: 1984
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Curtis
From the Summary ...'Successful prescribed burning on steep slopes in heavy fuels demands good preparation and planning from the start to the finish. Don*t overload the burn unit with fire fighters. Use only the personnel needed to accomplish the burn. It will not be easy and…
Year: 1984
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Brown
From the Final Remarks...'Designing fire prescriptions to meet today's demand for skill and professionalism requires an orderly planning process. At the start of this process, fire objectives must be derived from land managment objectives and specifically stated in terms of what…
Year: 1984
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Matson, Schneider, Aldridge, Satchwell
This report discusses the potential usefulness of thermal infrared sensors onboard NOAA polar-orbiting satelites for detecting fires. In particular, the 3.8-micron channel is sensitive to high temperature sources such as fires. This paper will demonstrate how the 3.8-micron…
Year: 1984
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Wendy, Springsteen, Barnes, Rupp
The arctic and boreal ecosystems that dominate Alaska's landscape are undergoing changes in response to rising temperatures and changes in precipitation regimes (Hinzman et al. 2005). Alaska has seen a warming trend over the past several decades, with an average increase in mean…
Year: 2011
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
Gillis
Scientist Katey M. Walter Anthony (Aquatic Ecosystem Ecologist at UAF) has been studying the amount of methane gas being released into the atmosphere from thawing permafrost. As long frozen plants and other organic materials begin to thaw, they also begin to decay, producing…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Barrett, McGuire, Hoy, Kasischke
Large fire years in which >1% of the landscape burns are becoming more frequent in the Alaskan (USA) interior, with four large fire years in the past 10 years, and 79,000 km2 (17% of the region) burned since 2000. We modeled fire severity conditions for the entire area burned…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Tenenbaum
Last week, New Mexico's famous Los Alamos National Laboratory, home of the atomic bomb, was shut down when a wildfire exploded from 2,000 acres to 49,000 acres over 24 hours, forcing the evacuation of the town of Los Alamos. A wildfire that started May 29 in droughted Arizona…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES