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 The database provides a listing of fire research publications relevant to Alaska and a venue for sharing unpublished agency reports and works in progress that are not normally found in the published literature.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 127
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
Williams
From the text ... 'The 1988 fire season showed us much about the importance of basing decisions on fire regimes and their associated fire behavior characteristics. Although our policies are necessarily broad, we are learnng that implementation of programs must be based on the…
Year: 1995
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
van Wagtendonk
To trully allow fires to play their natural role in wilderness ecosystems, it is sometimes necessary to have large fires of long duration. Large fires are ecologically significant events that drive many other ecosystem processes. However, these fires pose significant management…
Year: 1995
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Leenhouts
From the text ... 'Wilderness areas are planned and managed as part of the entire Service land unit with appropriate management to comply with the Wilderness Act, and in Alaska, the Alaska National Interests Lands Conservation Act. The Service has long recognized that ecosystems…
Year: 1995
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Coloff
From the text ... 'Thus, the intent of this paper is to suggest that prescribed fire can be used in a manner that, on balance with wildfire, provides a net reduction in air emissions and a net improvement and benefit to air quality and public health, while maintaining the health…
Year: 1995
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
McAlpine
[no description entered]
Year: 1995
Type: Document
Source: 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
Bell, Cleaves, Croft, Husari, Schuster, Truesdale
[unpublished report] From the text...'Because of the soaring expenditures (nearly $1 billion in FY 1994) for fire management, the Fire Economics Assessment Team was formed in January of 1995 by USDA Forest Service, Fire and Aviation Management, and chartered with the…
Year: 1995
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Bergeron, Flannigan
Although an increasing frequency of forest fires has been suggested as a consequence of global warming, there are no empirical data that have shown climatically driven increases in fire frequency since the warming that has followed the end of the 'Little Ice Age' (~1850). In…
Year: 1995
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Wikars
Breeding populations of the fire-adapted carabid-beetle A. quadripunctatum were found in most of the fifteen investigated burned, uncut forests, but not in any of the fifteen burned clear-cuts, although a few immigrants were found in two of them. The proportion of open-habitat…
Year: 1995
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Larsen, MacDonald
Ring-width chronologies from three white spruce (Picea glauca (Moench) Voss) and two jack pine (Pinus banksiana Lamb.) sites in the boreal forest of northern Alberta were constructed to determine whether they could provide proxy records of monthly weather, summer fire weather,…
Year: 1995
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