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 The database provides a listing of fire research publications relevant to Alaska and a venue for sharing unpublished agency reports and works in progress that are not normally found in the published literature.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 197
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
Lin, McCarty, Wang, Rogers, Morton, Collatz, Jin, Randerson
Fires in croplands, plantations, and rangelands contribute significantly to fire emissions in the United States, yet are often overshadowed by wildland fires in efforts to develop inventories or estimate responses to climate change. Here we quantified decadal trends, interannual…
Year: 2014
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
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
Barbero, Abatzoglou, Steel, Larkin
Very large-fires (VLFs) have widespread impacts on ecosystems, air quality, fire suppression resources, and in many regions account for a majority of total area burned. Empirical generalized linear models of the largest fires (>5000 ha) across the contiguous United States (US…
Year: 2014
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES, TTRS
Romps, Seeley, Vollaro, Molinari
Lightning plays an important role in atmospheric chemistry and in the initiation of wildfires, but the impact of global warming on lightning rates is poorly constrained. Here we propose that the lightning flash rate is proportional to the convective available potential energy (…
Year: 2014
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES, TTRS
Runoff sources and flow paths in a partially burned, upland boreal catchment underlain by permafrost
Boreal soils in permafrost regions contain vast quantities of frozen organic material that is released to terrestrial and aquatic environments via subsurface flow paths as permafrost thaws. Longer flow paths may allow chemical reduction of solutes, nutrients, and contaminants,…
Year: 2014
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Stephens, Burrows, Buyantuyev, Gray, Keane, Kubian, Liu, Seijo, Shu, Tolhurst, van Wagtendonk
Mega-fires are often defined according to their size and intensity but are more accurately described by their socioeconomic impacts. Three factors -- climate change, fire exclusion, and antecedent disturbance, collectively referred to as the 'mega-fire triangle' -- likely…
Year: 2014
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Spellman, Mulder, Hollingsworth
As climate rapidly warms at high-latitudes, the boreal forest faces the simultaneous threats of increasing invasive plant abundances and increasing area burned by wildfire. Highly flammable and widespread black spruce (Picea mariana) forest represents a boreal habitat that may…
Year: 2014
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Shulski, You, Krieger, Baule, Zhang, Zhang, Horowitz
Meteorological observations from more than 250 stations in the Beaufort and Chukchi Sea coastal, interior, and offshore regions were gathered and quality-controlled for the period 1979 through 2009. These stations represent many different observing networks that operate in the…
Year: 2014
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Rocca, Miniat, Mitchell
From the text ... 'Because temperature is forecast to increase almost everywhere, all the regions except the mid-Atlantic region project increases in wildfire activity, despite the variability in precipitation forecasts. The magnitude and impact of future wildfire activity will…
Year: 2014
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Krause, Kloster, Wilkenskjeld, Paeth
In this study, components of the Max Planck Institute Earth System Model were used to explore how changes in lightning induced by climate change alter wildfire activity. To investigate how climate change alters global flash frequency, simulations with the atmospheric general…
Year: 2014
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
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
The following list of fire research topics and questions were generated by personnel from agencies and organizations within AWFCG during 2014 Fall Fire Review and through other solicitations. The topics were initially ranked by the AWFCG Fire Research, Development and…
Year: 2014
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Rupp
This discussion included a project update including a basic overview, preliminary results on the efffects of fuel treatments on permafrost and fuel composition, the modeling framework, and products. They hope to simulate wildfire in response to changing fire management options.
Year: 2014
Type: Media
Source: FRAMES
Rodriguez
One of the factors that shapes the Alaskan Boreal forest is the frequency in which previously burned areas re-burn, also known as the fire return interval. The Alaskan fire regime itself is subject to various climate influences one of which is temperature. Using geographic…
Year: 2014
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES