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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 The database provides a listing of fire research publications relevant to Alaska and a venue for sharing unpublished agency reports and works in progress that are not normally found in the published literature.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 1 - 25 of 124

Alexander, Cruz
We have devised a rule of thumb for obtaining a first approximation of a fire’s spread rate that wildland fire operations personnel may find valuable in certain situations. It is based on the premise that under certain conditions wind speed is the dominant factor in determining…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Wickham, Vose, Peterson
The Nation’s authoritative assessment of climate impacts, the Fourth National Climate Assessment Vol. II: Impacts, Risks, and Adaptation in the United States (NCA4 Vol. II) was released in November 2018. This presentation will address the impacts of climate change on land cover…
Year: 2019
Type: Media
Source: FRAMES

CMATs work closely with incident management teams, Forest Service or other land management agencies, community residents and leaders to identify mitigation opportunities before a wildfire impacts the community. CMATs work with local partners to identify and help them resolve…
Year: 2019
Type: Media
Source: FRAMES

Wagenbrenner, Forthofer, Page, Butler
An open source computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solver has been incorporated into the WindNinja modeling framework. WindNinja is widely used by wildland fire managers, as well as researchers and practitioners in other fields, such as wind energy, wind erosion, and search and…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Leach
This seminar is part of the USFS Missoula Fire Lab Seminar Series. The National Weather Service (NWS) Real-Time Mesoscale Analysis (RTMA) has been developed to provide a national standard Analysis of Record (AoR) for large scale verification and bias-correction efforts. The RTMA…
Year: 2019
Type: Media
Source: FRAMES

Powers, Bresch, Schwartz, Coen, Sobash
Abrupt changes in wind direction and speed can dramatically impact wildfire development and spread. Most importantly, such changes can pose significant problems to firefighting efforts and have resulted in a number of fire fatalities over the years. Frequent causes of such wind…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Belval, Wei, Bevers
Wildland firefighting requires managers to make decisions in complex decision environments that hold many uncertainties; these decisions need to be adapted dynamically over time as fire behavior evolves. Models used in firefighting decisions should also have the capability to…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Steblein, Miller, Soileau
The U.S. Geological Survey's Wildland Fire Science Program produces fundamental information to identify the causes of wildfires, understand the impacts and benefits of both wildfires and prescribed fires, and help prevent and manage larger, catastrophic events. Our fire…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Moore
Purpose of Review: This review is on global wildland fire management research needs from the standpoint of 'integrated fire management'. It seeks to apply a characterisation of fires to frame research needs, and also recognise some differences in research needs between 'normal…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Soliman, Cagan, Buldum
This study aims to encourage the idea of utilizing unmanned aerial vehicles in the fire-fighting application. In this paper, we present a remote-controlled rotary-wing unmanned aerial vehicle made from metal alloys. This unmanned aerial vehicle, using a payload drop mechanism,…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Hedayati, Bahrani, Zhou, Quarles, Gorham
Generation of firebrands from various fuels has been well-studied in the past decade. Limited details have been released about the methodology for characterizing firebrands such as the proper sample size and the measurement process. This study focuses on (1) finding the minimum…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Takahashi
Each year, fires in the wildland-urban interface (WUI)—the place where homes and wildlands meet or intermingle—have caused significant damage to communities. To contribute to firefighter and public safety by reducing the risk of structure ignition, fire blankets for wrapping a…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Alexander
Heuristic approaches to problem solving, commonly called rules of thumb, employ practical, quick, in the moment, methods that are not intended to be strictly accurate or reliable in every situation but sufficient for most decision making situations, especially when there is…
Year: 2019
Type: Media
Source: FRAMES

Blankenship
Powerpoint talk presented by Dr. Clay Blankenship, Universities Space Research Association (USRA)/NASA Short-Term Prediction Research and Transition (SPoRT) Soil moisture is a critical variable for agriculture and for predicting fire risk, and monitoring drought and water…
Year: 2019
Type: Media
Source: FRAMES

Ziel, Moore, Lahm
The Advanced Fire Environment Learning Unit (AFELU) will host three speakers to talk about Predictive Services comparison tools (Robert Ziel, Alaska Fire Science Consortium), predicting fire behavior in Alaska (Chris Moore, Alaska Fire Service), and smoke tools (Pete Lahm, US…
Year: 2019
Type: Media
Source: FRAMES

Overall, drought conditions had improved across the Southern Area Geographic Area over the past two years. During the spring of 2015 drought conditions began establishing across Southern Appalachian mountain states and steadily spread and increased in severity through the fall…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Thompson, Wei, Calkin, O'Connor, Dunn, Anderson, Hogland
Purpose of Review: The objectives of this paper are to briefly review basic risk management and analytics concepts, describe their nexus in relation to wildfire response, demonstrate real-world application of analytics to support response decisions and organizational learning,…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Ottmar, Larkin, Brown, French
The Joint Fire Science Program (JFSP) and the Environmental Security Technology Certification Program (ESTCP) initiated the Fire and Smoke Model Experiment (FASMEE) (https://sites.google.com/firenet.gov/fasmee/) by funding Project 15-S-01-01 to identify and collect a set of…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Brown
ince the 1990s, USDA Forest Service employees and leaders have taken steps to improve the agency's safety record (USDA Forest Service 2018), resulting in a declining number of fatalities since 2010. Yet wildland firefighter entrapments have persisted (NIFC 2018), despite the…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Black, Boyatzis, Thiel, Rochford
Effective leadership of wildland fire operations requires paying careful attention to the fire itself and to relationships both internal and external to the incident. At the center of the action is the incident commander (IC), who must integrate her or his skill in managing the…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Brown
The culture of the USDA Forest Service has been shaped by the maxim 'Certainly it can be done' (Pinchot 1947), borrowed from the Coast Guard by the agency's first Chief, Gifford Pinchot (1905-10). From the moment employees joined the Forest Service beginning in 1905, they…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Page, Butler
Wildland firefighters work in complex and dynamic environments, with many dangers that pose serious threats to their safety. Falling snags and rocks, steep and rugged terrain, and rapid increases in fire behavior are just some of the dangers that affect wildland firefighters.…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Harbour
Fires that occur outside buildings, improvements, and structures, whether fueled by grass, brush, forest, timber, or other materials, are the wildland fires we deal with in the fire service. A wildland fire can take many forms: thousands of acres of trees on fire; the purposeful…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Abatzoglou, Williams, Barbero
Changes in global fire activity are influenced by a multitude of factors including land‐cover change, policies, and climatic conditions. This study uses 17 climate models to evaluate when changes in fire weather, as realized through the Fire Weather Index, emerge from the…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Monedero, Ramírez, Cardil
Accurately predicting fire spread and behaviour on the fireline, in the field, is highly important in order to prevent the loss of human life, improve the success of initial attack and better understand the potential fire behaviour, minimizing many risks for firefighters. We…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES