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 The database provides a listing of fire research publications relevant to Alaska and a venue for sharing unpublished agency reports and works in progress that are not normally found in the published literature.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 187
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
Johnston, van Kooten
In an effort to reduce CO2 emissions from fossil fuel burning, renewable energy policies incentivize use of forest biomass as an energy source. Many governments have assumed (legislated) the carbon flux from burning biomass to be neutral because biomass growth sequesters CO2.…
Year: 2015
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Val Martin, Pierce, Heald
From the text ... 'Smoke can be transported hundreds of miles downwind by prevailing winds or convective winds generated by fires themselves with concentrations sufficient to make it the most significant source of air pollution over large areas.'
Year: 2015
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Heilman, Tang, Luo, Zhong, Winkler, Bian
From the text ... 'Researchers at Michigan State University and the Forest Services's Northern Research Station worked on a joint study to examine the possible effects of future global and regional climate change on the occurrence of fire-weather patterns often associated with…
Year: 2015
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Paudel, Nitschke, Simard, Innes
The southwestern region of the Yukon Territory of Canada has experienced an unprecedented spruce bark beetle outbreak (Dendroctonus rufipennis) and an increase in the frequency of forest fires that extend beyond historical trends and that have caused significant impacts on…
Year: 2015
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Brown, Jorgenson, Douglas, Romanovsky, Kielland, Hiemstra, Euskirchen, Ruess
We examined the effects of fire disturbance on permafrost degradation and thaw settlement across a series of wildfires (from similar to 1930 to 2010) in the forested areas of collapse-scar bog complexes in the Tanana Flats lowland of interior Alaska. Field measurements were…
Year: 2015
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Appenzeller
From the text ... 'The trees of the boreal, after all, are used to fire. The dominant species in Alaska and much of Canada, black spruce, maintains an aerial storehouse of seeds, locked in cones that form a distinctive tuft at the treetop. When a fire singes the cones and melts…
Year: 2015
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Wang, Thompson, Marshall, Tymstra, Carr, Flannigan
In Canadian forests, the majority of burned area occurs on a small number of days of extreme fire weather. These days lie within the tail end of the distribution of fire weather, and are often the periods when fire suppression capacity is most challenged. We examined the…
Year: 2015
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Rissman, Owley, Shaw, Thompson
Perpetual conservation easements (CEs) are popular for restricting development and land use, but their fixed terms create challenges for adaptation to climate change. The increasing pace of environmental and social change demands adaptive conservation instruments. To examine the…
Year: 2015
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Lee, Schlemme, Murray, Unsworth
Little research has focused on the economic impact associated with climate-change induced wildland fire on natural ecosystems and the goods and services they provide. We examine changes in wildland fire patterns based on the U.S. Forest Service's MC1 dynamic global vegetation…
Year: 2015
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Huang, Dahal, Liu, Jin, Young, Li, Liu
The albedo change caused by fires and the subsequent succession is spatially heterogeneous, leading to the need to assess the spatiotemporal variation of surface shortwave forcing (SSF) as a component to quantify the climate impacts of high-latitude fires. We used an image…
Year: 2015
Type: Document
Source: TTRS
Girardin, Terrier
Wildfire activity is projected to increase through upcoming decades in boreal Canada due to climatic changes. Amongst the proposed strategies to offset the climate-driven fire risk is the introduction of broadleaf species into dense-coniferous landscapes so as to decrease the…
Year: 2015
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
Brown, Jorgenson, Douglas, Romanovsky, Kielland, Hiemstra, Euskirchen, Ruess
We examined the effects of fire disturbance on permafrost degradation and thaw settlement across a series of wildfires (from ~1930 to 2010) in the forested areas of collapse‐scar bog complexes in the Tanana Flats lowland of interior Alaska. Field measurements were combined with…
Year: 2015
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES