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 The database provides a listing of fire research publications relevant to Alaska and a venue for sharing unpublished agency reports and works in progress that are not normally found in the published literature.
Type
Topic
Year
Displaying 1 - 25 of 159
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
Huntington, Goodstein, Euskirchen
Climate change incurs costs, but government adaptation budgets are limited. Beyond a certain point, individuals must bear the costs or adapt to new circumstances, creating political-economic tipping points that we explore in three examples. First, many Alaska Native villages are…
Year: 2012
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Rocha, Loranty, Higuera, Mack, Hu, Jones, Breen, Rastetter, Goetz, Shaver
Recent large and frequent fires above the Alaskan arctic circle have forced a reassessment of the ecological and climatological importance of fire in arctic tundra ecosystems. Here we provide a general overview of the occurrence, distribution, and ecological and climate…
Year: 2012
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
LeQuire, Hunter
From the text ... 'Wildland fire managers face increasingly steep challenges to meet air quality standards while planning prescribed fire and its inevitable smoke emissions. The goals of sound fire management practices, including fuel load reduction through prescribed burning,…
Year: 2012
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Barrier, Johnson
We used an information-theoretic model comparison approach to investigate the influence of forest stand attributes resulting from wildfire on the occupancy of winter habitats by barren-ground caribou (Rangifer tarandus groenlandicus) in the Northwest Territories, Canada. We used…
Year: 2012
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Yang
Fighting fire with fire has been given the green light by a new study of techniques used to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires. And with a rise in wildfires predicted in many parts of the country, researchers say controlled burns and other treatments to manage this risk…
Year: 2012
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Staver, Levin
The role of fire and climate in determining savanna and forest distributions requires comprehensive theoretical reevaluation. Empirical studies show that climate constrains maximum tree cover and that fire feedbacks can reduce tree cover substantially, but neither the stability…
Year: 2012
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Guyette, Stambaugh, Dey, Muzika
A predictive equation for estimating fire frequency was developed from theories and data in physical chemistry, ecosystem ecology, and climatology. We refer to this equation as the Physical Chemistry Fire Frequency Model (PC2FM). The equation was calibrated and validated with…
Year: 2012
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Brown, Johnstone
Widespread climate change is expected to lead to altered patterns of disturbance, thereby driving future ecosystem change. This interaction, which is often poorly recognized or understood, may be particularly important in the sub-arctic due to rapid climate change and frequent…
Year: 2012
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
Ryan, Koerner
From the Conclusions ... 'Fires have impacted cultures for millennia and fire will continue to impact contemporary cultures as well as the remnants of past cultures. The challenge is to manage vagetation/fuels to minimize damage to contemporary cultures as well as the cultural…
Year: 2012
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Dr. Carissa Brown, Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Sherbrooke, joined us for a webinar on February 23, 2012 (11:00 am to noon AKST) entitled 'Once burned, twice shy: Repeat fires result in black spruce regeneration failure.' Dr. Brown is currently studying plant…
Year: 2012
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Stratton
Fire growth models in WFDSS worksheet with answers from the 2012 Fire Modeling Workshop
Year: 2012
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Stratton
Geospatial fire modeling considerations in Alaska handout from the 2012 Fire Modeling Workshop
Year: 2012
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES