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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 The database provides a listing of fire research publications relevant to Alaska and a venue for sharing unpublished agency reports and works in progress that are not normally found in the published literature.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 176 - 200 of 413

These proceedings summarize the results of a symposium designed to address current issues of agencies with wildland fire protection responsibility at the federal and state levels in the United States as well as agencies in the international community. The topics discussed at the…
Year: 2008
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Chavez, Absher, Winter
Fire events often have a large impact on recreation and tourism, yet these issues had not been addressed from a social science perspective. To address his, the Wildland Recreation and Urban Cultures Research Work Unit (RWU) of the Pacific Southwest Research Station acquired…
Year: 2008
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Lipsett, Materna, Stone, Therriault, Blaisdell, Cook
Smoke rolls into town, blanketing the city, turning on streetlights, creating an eerie and choking fog. Switchboards light up as people look for answers. Citizens want to know what they should do to protect themselves. School officials want to know if outdoor events should be…
Year: 2008
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Galtie
The recent evolution of the rural and urban areas has led to the progressive emergence of a complex and multiform wildland urban interface. Today this interface has turned into a fire threat which is omnipresent. The evolution in progress raises in particular the question of the…
Year: 2008
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

A primary mission of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service is multiple resource management, and one of the emerging themes is forest restoration. The National Silviculture Workshop, a biennial event co-sponsored by the Forest Service, was held May 7-10, 2007, in…
Year: 2008
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Holsten, Hennon, Trummer, Kruse, Schultz, Lundquist
The U.S. Forest Service publication, Identifcation of Destructive Alaska Forest Insects (91), dealt mainly with the damaging forest insects of Southeastern Alaska. Insects and Diseases of Alaskan Forests (137, 138) included disease agents and were a logical statewide expansion…
Year: 2008
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Lawrence, Slater, Tomas, Holland, Deser
Coupled climate models and recent observational evidence suggest that Arctic sea ice may undergo abrupt periods of loss during the next fifty years. Here, we evaluate how rapid sea ice loss affects terrestrial Arctic climate and ground thermal state in the Community Climate…
Year: 2008
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Hollingsworth, Schuur, Chapin, Walker
The boreal forest is the largest terrestrial biome in North America and holds a large portion of the world's reactive soil carbon. Therefore, understanding soil carbon accumulation on a landscape or regional scale across the boreal forest is useful for predicting future soil…
Year: 2008
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Chapin, Randerson, McGuire, Foley, Field
Ecosystems influence climate through multiple pathways, primarily by changing the energy, water, and greenhouse-gas balance of the atmosphere. Consequently, efforts to mitigate climate change through modification of one pathway, as with carbon in the Kyoto Protocol, only…
Year: 2008
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Greulich
Airtankers, while actively engaging in initial attack, are sometimes reassigned and flown directly to another randomly occurring initial attack fire. Airtanker system planning that means to incorporate this fire-to-fire transfer activity needs information about the flight…
Year: 2008
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Tachajapong, Lozano, Mahalingam, Zhou, Weise
Crown fire initiation is studied by using a simple experimental and detailed physical modeling based on Large Eddy Simulation (LES). Experiments conducted thus far reveal that crown fuel ignition via surface fire occurs when the crown base is within the continuous flame region…
Year: 2008
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Sommers
The wildland urban interface (WUI) is a common story line in many of today's wildfire events. The WUI concept was formally introduced in 1987 Forest Service Research budget documents but was not acknowledged as a major component for federal fire management until the 2000…
Year: 2008
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Prestemon, Abt, Gebert
Approaches for forecasting wildfire suppression costs in advance of a wildfire season are demonstrated for two lead times: fall and spring of the current fiscal year (Oct. 1-Sept. 30). Model functional forms are derived from aggregate expressions of a least cost plus net value…
Year: 2008
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Rehm
A simple physics-based mathematical model is developed for prediction of the propagation of a grass-fire front driven by an ambient wind and by entrainment winds generated from one or more burning structures. This model accounts for the heterogeneous nature of the burning in a…
Year: 2008
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Pyne
In this wide-ranging essay, Stephen Pyne, the preeminent historian of wildfire around the world, explores the past, present, and future of the term 'wildland-urban interface' and the policies regarding fire in that setting. He argues that, while we need to remove fire from the…
Year: 2008
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Enninful, Torvi
A numerical model of heat transfer in dry soil was developed to predict temperatures and depth of lethal heat penetration during cone calorimeter tests used to simulate wildland fire exposures. The model was used to compare predictions made using constant and temperature-…
Year: 2008
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES, TTRS

Sharples
The effects of wind and topographic slope are important considerations when determining the rate and direction of spread of wildfires. Accordingly, most models used to predict the direction and rate of spread contain components designed to account for these effects. Over the…
Year: 2008
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Preisler, Chen, Fujioka, Benoit, Westerling
The National Fire Danger Rating System indices deduced from a regional simulation weather model were used to estimate probabilities and numbers of large fire events on monthly and 1-degree grid scales. The weather model simulations and forecasts are ongoing experimental products…
Year: 2008
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Verbyla, Kasischke, Hoy
The maximum solar elevation is typically less than 50 degrees in the Alaskan boreal region and solar elevation varies substantially during the growing season. Because of the relatively low solar elevation at boreal latitudes, the effect of topography on spectral reflectance can…
Year: 2008
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Hoy, French, Turetsky, Trigg, Kasischke
Satellite remotely sensed data of fire disturbance offers important information; however, current methods to study fire severity may need modifications for boreal regions. We assessed the potential of the differenced Normalized Burn Ratio (dNBR) and other spectroscopic indices…
Year: 2008
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES, TTRS

Murphy, Reynolds, Koltun
During the 2004 fire season ~6.6 million acres (~2.7 million ha) burned across Alaska. Nearly 2 million of these were on National Wildlife Refuge System lands inaccessible from the state's limited road system. Many fires burned through September, driven by unusually warm and dry…
Year: 2008
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES, TTRS

Liang, Calkin, Gebert, Venn, Silverstein
There is an urgent and immediate need to address the excessive cost of large fires. Here, we studied large wildland fire suppression expenditures by the US Department of Agriculture Forest Service. Among 16 potential non-managerial factors, which represented fire size and shape…
Year: 2008
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES, TTRS

Jimenez, Hussaini, Goodrick
The purpose of the present work is to quantify parametric uncertainty in the Rothermel wildland fire spread model (implemented in software such as BehavePlus3 and FARSITE), which is undoubtedly among the most widely used fire spread models in the United States. This model…
Year: 2008
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Plucinski, Anderson
Factors affecting ignition thresholds of the litter layer of shrubland vegetation were investigated using reconstructed litter beds in a laboratory. The factors investigated were fuel moisture content (FMC), litter type (primarily species), pilot ignition source, and wind.…
Year: 2008
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Higgins, Bond, Trollope, Williams
We develop empirical models for the rate of spread and intensity of fires in grass fuels. The models are based on a well-known physical analogy for the rate of spread of a fire through a continuous fuelbed. Unlike other models based on this analogy, we do not attempt to directly…
Year: 2008
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES