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 The database provides a listing of fire research publications relevant to Alaska and a venue for sharing unpublished agency reports and works in progress that are not normally found in the published literature.
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 132
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
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
Suffling
Studies of anticipated effects of global warming tend to concentrate on the physiological limits of individual organisms, and imputed modifications to biome distributions expresed as climax ecosystems. Changes in distributions of individual species and of tree species…
Year: 1993
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Weihs, Small
We develop a simple analytical model to estimate the thickness of a smoke layer formed by a plume of a large area fire and to account for crosswinds. We take advantage of the dominant flow features in the upper part of the rising plume and in the smoke layer far from the plume…
Year: 1993
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
This report offers findings and recommendations that address the threat of wildfires in forest and range ecosystems. The report is based on information gathered by the National Commision on Wildfire Disasters and is intended for policymakers at the federal, state, and local…
Year: 1993
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Brotak
Knowledge of fire behavior is critical for those who control wildfires. Fire managers must know spread rates and intensity-not just to eventually contain and extinguish the fire but also to keep their fire control personnel safe. Managers realize that weather is paramount in…
Year: 1993
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Landhausser, Wein
1. A fire of unusually great severity (deep burning) burned across the forest-tundra near Inuvik, Northwest Territories from August 8 to 18, 1968. 2. Burned-unburned paired study sites around the fire perimeter, which had been established in both tundra and forest-tundra in 1973…
Year: 1993
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Whitlock
Pollen records from northern Grand Teton National Park, the Pinyon Peak Highlands, and southern Yellowstone National Park were examined to study the pattern of reforestation and climatic change following late-Pinedale Glaciation. The vegetational reconstruction was aided by…
Year: 1993
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Wotton, Flannigan
The Canadian Climate Centre's General Circulation Model provides two 10-year data sets of simulated daily weather for a large array of gridpoints across North America. A subset of this data, comprised of only those points within the forested part of Canada, was selected for…
Year: 1993
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Burgan
The 1988 National Fire Danger System implements the Keetch-Byran Drought Index. This indexis output both as an estimator of drought in its own right and is used to modify fire danger calculations to account for deep drying of dead vefetation and duff. A method initializes this…
Year: 1993
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Kasischke, French, Harrell, Christensen, Ustin, Barry
Normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) composite image data, produced from AVHRR data collected in 1990, were evaluated for locating and mapping the areal extent of wildfires in the boreal forests of Alaska during that year. A technique was developed to map forest fire…
Year: 1993
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Clark, Stocks
Changing climate and land use appear to importantly affect the biosphere by way of impacts on fire regimes. Feedback effects on climate and air quality are likely through emissions of trace gases, aerosols, and particulates that affect radiation budgets, stability of the…
Year: 1993
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