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 The database provides a listing of fire research publications relevant to Alaska and a venue for sharing unpublished agency reports and works in progress that are not normally found in the published literature.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 201 - 225 of 434
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
Burton, Parisien, Hicke, Hall, Freeburn
The present study undertook a hierarchical analysis of the variability within and among some individual fire events in the boreal ecozones of Canada and Alaska. When stratified by ecozone, differences in the spatial and temporal distribution of wildfires were observed in the…
Year: 2008
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Woodall, Westfall, Lutes, Oswalt
Coarse woody debris (CWD) may be defined as dead and down trees of a certain minimum size that are an important forest ecosystem component (e.g., wildlife habitat, carbon stocks, and fuels). Due to field efficiency concerns, some natural resource inventories only measure the…
Year: 2008
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Sullivan, Holden, Patterson, McMeeking, Kreidenweis, Malm, Hao, Wold, Collett
Biomass burning is an important source of particulate organic carbon (OC) in the atmosphere. Quantifying this contribution in time and space requires a means of routinely apportioning contributions of smoke from biomass burning to OC. Smoke marker (for example, levoglucosan)…
Year: 2008
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Stockli, Rutishauser, Dragoni, O'Keefe, Thornton, Jolly, Lu, Denning
Predicting the global carbon and water cycle requires a realistic representation of vegetation phenology in climate models. However most prognostic phenology models are not yet suited for global applications, and diagnostic satellite data can be uncertain and lack predictive…
Year: 2008
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Seli, Ager, Crookston, Finney, Bahro, Agee, McHugh
A simulation system was developed to explore how fuel treatments placed in random and optimal spatial patterns affect the growth and behavior of large fires when implemented at different rates over the course of five decades. The system consists of several command line programs…
Year: 2008
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Miller, Parisien, Ager, Finney
Spatially explicit information on the probability of burning is necessary for virtually all strategic fire and fuels management planning activities, including conducting wildland fire risk assessments, optimizing fuel treatments, and prevention planning. Predictive models…
Year: 2008
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Lewis, Arnott, Moosmüller, Wold
A dual-wavelength photoacoustic instrument operating at 405 and 870 nm was used during the 2006 Fire Lab at Missoula Experiment to measure light scattering and absorption by smoke from the combustion of a variety of biomass fuels. Simultaneous measurements of aerosol light…
Year: 2008
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES