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 The database provides a listing of fire research publications relevant to Alaska and a venue for sharing unpublished agency reports and works in progress that are not normally found in the published literature.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 39
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
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
Soverel, Coops, Perrakis, Daniels, Gergel
Wildfire is a complex and critical ecological process that is an integral component of western Canadian terrestrial ecosystems. Therefore, Canadian land management agencies such as Parks Canada require detailed burn severity data for the monitoring and managing of both wildland…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES, 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
Lewis, Hudak, Ottmar, Robichaud, Lentile, Hood, Cronan, Morgan
Wildfire is a major forest disturbance in interior Alaska that can both directly and indirectly alter ecological processes. We used a combination of pre- and post-fire forest floor depths and post-fire ground cover assessments measured in the field, and high-resolution airborne…
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
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
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
Olson, Cronan, McKenzie, Barnes, Camp
Wildland fires play a critical role in maintaining the ecological integrity of boreal forests in Alaska. Identifying and maintaining natural fire regimes is an important component of fire management. There are numerous research projects that directly or indirectly address…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Jiang, Zhuang
Large fires are a major disturbance in Canadian forests and exert significant effects on both the climate system and ecosystems. During the last century, extremely large fires accounted for the majority of Canadian burned area. By making an instaneous change over a vast area of…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES, TTRS
Rupp, Olson, Duffy
Interest in the emergence of graminoid vegetation as a dominant ecosystem type across Alaska has recently increased. This is due to both analysis of remotely sensed vegetation products and anecdotal observations from field work. This work serves as a component of a larger effort…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Bernhardt, Hollingsworth, Chapin
QUESTION: How do pre-fire conditions (community composition and environmental characteristics) and climate-driven disturbance characteristics (fire severity) affect post-fire community composition in black spruce stands? LOCATION: Northern boreal forest, interior Alaska. METHODS…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES, TTRS
In response to a recent criticism of the practice of prescription burning published in Trends in Plant Science, USGS scientist Jon Keeley and colleagues from Spain, South Africa and Australia contend that when applied within the context of a landscape's natural fire regime,…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
This document summarizes the 2011 AFSC workshop. Topics discussed included boreal fire history datasets in Alaska, fire return intervals in boreal forests, the Probabilistic Fire Analysis System (PFAS), the Canadian Wildland Fire Strategy, impacts of changing tundra fire regimes…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Alexander
The third installment in the International Association of Wildland Fire's (IAWF) Fire Behavior and Fuels Conference series was held in Spokane, WA, October 25-29, 2010, and commemorated the 100th anniversary of the 1910 fires in the Northern Rocky Mountains. The theme of the…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES, TTRS
Bowman, Balch, Artaxo, Bond, Cochrane, D'Antonio, DeFries, Johnston, Keeley, Krawchuk, Kull, Mack, Moritz, Pyne, Roos, Scott, Sodhi, Swetnam
Humans and their ancestors are unique in being a fire-making species, but 'natural' (i.e. independent of humans) fires have an ancient, geological history on Earth. Natural fires have influenced biological evolution and global biogeochemical cycles, making fire integral to the…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Higuera, Barnes, Chipman, Urban, Hu
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. 1987, 2004),…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Girard, Payette, Gagnon
Lichen-spruce woodlands occur in the closed-crown forest zone as a divergent type of the spruce-moss forest because of regeneration failure caused by compounded disturbances (fire, insect outbreaks, and logging). From the southern limit of distribution of lichen woodlands (47…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES, TTRS
Dillon, Holden, Morgan, Crimmins, Heyerdahl, Luce
Fire is a keystone process in many ecosystems of western North America. Severe fires kill and consume large amounts of above- and belowground biomass and affect soils, resulting in long-lasting consequences for vegetation, aquatic ecosystem productivity and diversity, and other…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Sommers, Coloff, Conard
This report synthesizes available fire history and climate change scientific knowledge to aid managers with fire decisions in the face of ongoing 21st Century climate change. Fire history and climate change (FHCC) have been ongoing for over 400 million years of Earth history,…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Hanes, Ahern, Cantin, Flannigan
Fire is an important disturbance in the forest ecosystems of Canada. On average, 18,471 km^2 of forest burn annually, 92% of which burns within the boreal forest. Due to the long history of fire in the boreal forest, many boreal tree species have evolved to rely on fire to…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Higuera, Chipman, Barnes, Urban, Hu
Tundra fires have important ecological impacts on vegetation, wildlife, permafrost, and carbon cycling, but the pattern and controls of historic tundra fire regimes are poorly understood. We use sediment records from four lakes to develop a 2000-yr fire and vegetation history in…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Hessl
Fire is a global process affecting both the biosphere and the atmosphere. As a result, measuring rates of change in wildland fire and understanding the mechanisms responsible for such changes are important research goals. A large body of modeling studies projects increases in…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Stocks
Stephen Pyne is a world-renowned environmental historian and author who, over the past three decades, has produced numerous books dealing extensively with the history of fire on Earth and its strong linkage to the evolving role of humans on this planet. With his humanities and…
Year: 2011
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES