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 The database provides a listing of fire research publications relevant to Alaska and a venue for sharing unpublished agency reports and works in progress that are not normally found in the published literature.
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Topic
Year
Displaying 1 - 25 of 189
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
Prante, Little, Jones, McKee, Berrens
Increasing private wildfire risk mitigation is an important part of the larger forest restoration policy challenge. Data from an economic experiment are used to evaluate the effectiveness of providing fuel reductions on public land adjacent to private land to induce private…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: 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
Weir, Limb
From the text ... 'If waste motor oil could be used in drip torches, fire managers may have a new way to dispose of oil, reduce stockpiles of waste petroleum products, and offset some of the fuel costs associated with conducting prescribed burns.'
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Coen
From the text ... '... Understanding the interplay of factors -- particularly with the most variable one: weather -- can help explain and anticipate fire phenomena, a necessary part of managing an evolving fire situation. Changing our perspective from seeing just the fire to…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Parsons, Mell, McCauley
Crown fire endangers fire fighters and can have severe ecological consequences. Prediction of fire behavior in tree crowns is essential to informed decisions in fire management. Current methods used in fire management do not address variability in crown fuels. New mechanistic…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
McCarty
Crop residue burning is an extensive agricultural practice in the contiguous United States (CONUS). This analysis presents the results of a remote sensing-based study of crop residue burning emissions in the CONUS for the time period 2003-2007 for the atmospheric species of…
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
Hyde, Smith, Ottmar, Alvarado, Morgan
Coarse woody debris serves many functions in forest ecosystem processes and has important implications for fire management as it affects air quality, soil heating and carbon budgets when it combusts. There is relatively little research evaluating the physical properties relating…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES, 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
Romo, Gross
Fescue Prairie is one of the most threatened ecosystems in Canada, and burning is essential for conserving remnants of this grassland. Burning is a key process in the natural disturbance regime, but its effect on the soil seed bank in Fescue Prairie is poorly understood. We…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Nelson, Connot, Peterson, Martin
The LANDFIRE Program provides comprehensive vegetation and fuel datasets for the entire United States. As with many large-scale ecological datasets, vegetation and landscape conditions must be updated periodically to account for disturbances, growth, and natural succession. The…
Year: 2013
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
McCaffrey, Toman, Stidham, Shindler
As with other aspects of natural-resource management, the approach to managing wildland fires has evolved over time as scientific understanding has advanced and the broader context surrounding management decisions has changed. Prior to 2000 the primary focus of most fire…
Year: 2013
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES, TTRS
Kreye, Varner, Dugaw, Cao, Szecsei, Engber
The ignition and combustion of forest floor duff are poorly understood yet have been linked to soil heating and overstory tree mortality in many temperate coniferous forests. Research to date has focused on the characteristics of duff that facilitate ignition and spread,…
Year: 2013
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Kintisch
Scientists and firefighters ponder new ways to predict the spread of wildfire as the U.S. West faces ever more potent blazes.
Year: 2013
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Hyde, Dickinson, Bohrer, Calkin, Evers, Gilbertson-Day, Nicolet, Ryan, Tague
Wildland fire management has moved beyond a singular focus on suppression, calling for wildfire management for ecological benefit where no critical human assets are at risk. Processes causing direct effects and indirect, long-term ecosystem changes are complex and…
Year: 2013
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES, TTRS
Hudak, Ottmar, Vihnanek, Brewer, Smith, Morgan
White ash results from the complete combustion of surface fuels, making it a logically simple retrospective indicator of surface fuel consumption. However, the strength of this relationship has been neither tested nor adequately demonstrated with field measurements. We measured…
Year: 2013
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES, TTRS
Finney, Cohen, McAllister, Jolly
We explore the basis of understanding wildland fire behaviour with the intention of stimulating curiosity and promoting fundamental investigations of fire spread problems that persist even in the presence of tremendous modelling advances. Internationally, many fire models have…
Year: 2013
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES, TTRS
Butler, Ottmar, Rupp, Jandt, Miller, Howard, Schmoll, Theisen, Vihnanek, Jimenez
Mechanical (e.g., shearblading) and manual (e.g., thinning) fuel treatments have become the preferred strategy of many fire managers and agencies for reducing fire hazard in boreal forests. This study attempts to characterize the effectiveness of four fuel treatments through…
Year: 2013
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Busby, Amacher, Haight
In this article, we consider wildfire risk management decisions using a dynamic stochastic model of homeowner interaction in a setting where spatial externalities arise. Our central objective is to apply observations from the social science literature about homeowner preferences…
Year: 2013
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Yablecki, Bibeau, Smith
We propose a community-based model of land management for pre-emptive action to reduce the risk of wildfires in small communities situated in forested areas. This proposed approach transfers the responsibility of wildland-urban interface administration to the local community,…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Simeoni, Salinesi, Morandini
Vegetation cover is a heterogeneous medium composed of different kinds of fuels and non-combustible parts. Some properties of real fires arise from this heterogeneity. Creating heterogeneous fuel areas may be useful both in land management and in firefighting by reducing fire…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES, TTRS
Penn
The combination of a gutted B.C. Forest Service, vast areas of not sufficiently restocked forest lands, a quirky loophole in the Kyoto Protocol and a provincial government ideologically driven to sell off public assets has created the perfect opportunity to burn down B.C.'s…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Ferster, Coops, Harshaw, Kozak, Meitner
Wildfire management in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) protects property and life from wildland fire. One approach that has potential to provide information about the amount and location of fuels to forest managers and, at the same time, increase public knowledge and…
Year: 2013
Type: Document
Source: TTRS