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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 The database provides a listing of fire research publications relevant to Alaska and a venue for sharing unpublished agency reports and works in progress that are not normally found in the published literature.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 296

Holsinger, Parks, Parisien, Miller, Batllori, Moritz
Climate change poses a serious threat to biodiversity and unprecedented challenges to the preservation and protection of natural landscapes. We evaluated how climate change might affect vegetation in 22 of the largest and most iconic protected area (PA) complexes across North…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Nemens, Varner, Johnson
The practice of removing fire-killed trees from burned forests (or “postfire salvage logging”) has sparked public controversy and scientific debate when conducted on public lands in the United States. This review synthesizes the current scientific literature on the subject,…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Armatas, Borrie, Watson
Despite the generally accepted need for understanding social vulnerability within the context of USDA Forest Service planning and management, there is a lack of structured approaches available to practitioners to gain such an understanding. This social vulnerability protocol…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Reyes-García, Fernández-Llamazares, McElwee, Molnár, Öllerer, Wilson, Brondizio
Indigenous Peoples and local communities (IPLC) are affected by global environmental change because they directly rely on their immediate environment for meeting basic livelihood needs. Therefore, safeguarding and restoring ecosystem resilience is critical to support their well‐…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Cruz, Alexander
Dear Editor, In a paper published in the January 2016 issue of Fire Technology, Hoffman et al. provide an assessment of crown fire rate of spread predictions of two physics-based models, FIRETEC and the Wildland-urban interface Fire Dynamics Simulator (WFDS), through an indirect…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Strand, Hammond
Determining the age of natural conifer regeneration following wildfires is crucial to understanding ecological trajectories and predicting post-fire effects in conifer forests. However, traditional methods of determining seedling age via growth ring counts requires killing…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

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

Guertin, Goodrich, Burns, Sheppard, Patel, Clifford, Unkrich, Kepner, Levick
Functionality has been incorporated into the Automated Geospatial Watershed Assessment Tool (AGWA) to assess the impacts of wildland fire on runoff and erosion. AGWA (https://www.epa.gov/water-research/automated-geospatial-watershed-assess... or www.tucson.ars.ag.gov/agwa) is a…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Boschetti, Roy, Giglio, Huang, Zubkova, Humber
This paper presents a Stage 3 validation of the recently released Collection 6 NASA MCD64A1 500 m global burned area product. The product is validated by comparison with Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) image pairs acquired 16 days apart that were visually interpreted.…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Wang, ZhG, Zhang, Jin, Leung
Multispectral imaging (MI) provides important information for burned-area mapping. Due to the severe conditions of burned areas and the limitations of sensors, the resolution of collected multispectral images is sometimes very rough, hindering the accurate determination of…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Szpakowski, Rooker Jensen
Wildfire plays an important role in ecosystem dynamics, land management, and global processes. Understanding the dynamics associated with wildfire, such as risks, spatial distribution, and effects is important for developing a clear understanding of its ecological influences.…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Woźniak, Aleksansdrowicz
Mapping of regional fires would make it possible to analyse their environmental, social and economic impact, as well as to develop better fire management systems. However, automatic mapping of burnt areas has proved to be a challenging task, due to the wide diversity of…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Driscoll, Friggens
Wildfires and events that follow such as flooding and erosion are natural disturbances in many ecosystems. However, when these types of postfire events threaten life, property, and resources they become a concern for resource managers, communities, and private landowners. A…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Fromm, Peterson, Di Girolamo
The literature-spanning several recent decades-describes numerous attempts to characterize the efficacy of cumulonimbus 'Cb' convection as a pollutant pathway connecting the planetary BL to the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere (UTLS). The relatively new discovery of…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Gibson, Estop-Aragonés, Flannigan, Thompson, Olefeldt
Wildfire in boreal permafrost peatlands causes a thickening and warming of the seasonally thawed active layer, exposing large amounts of soil carbon to microbial processes and potential release as greenhouse gases. In this study, conducted in the discontinuous permafrost zone of…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Schaefer, Magi
For this study, we characterized the dependence of fire counts (FCs) on soil moisture (SM) at global and sub-global scales using 15 years of remote sensing data. We argue that this mathematical relationship serves as an effective way to predict fire because it is a proxy for the…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Shinohara, Matsushima
Laboratory experiments were conducted to determine whether stationary fire whirls just downwind of a meter-scale turbulent flame are the lowest part of the counter-rotating vortex pair (CVP) of the plume from the flame. Plumes from a turbulent pool fire and air flow around the…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Chipman, Hu
Novel fire regimes are expected in many boreal regions, and it is unclear how biogeochemical cycles will respond. We leverage fire and vegetation records from a highly flammable ecoregion in Alaska and present new lake-sediment analyses to examine biogeochemical responses to…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
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

Mendelsohn, Sohngen
Deforestation from timber harvests and farmland conversions have led to 565 GtCO2 (billion tons of carbon dioxide) being emitted into the atmosphere. Taking into account natural regeneration on forestland, Houghton (2003, 2008) and Houghton et al. (2012) estimate that…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Taylor
This article develops a theoretical model to analyze the impact of policies to promote defensible space — the most prominent wildfire risk mitigation strategy on private property — on the overall level of defensible space in a community when homeowners’ investment decisions are…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
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

Blunck, Butler, Bailey, Wagenbrenner
Spot fires caused by lofted embers (i.e., firebrands) can be a significant factor in the spread of wildland fires. Embers can be especially dangerous near the wildland urban interface (WUI) because of the potential for the fire to be spread near or among structures. Many studies…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Henn, Butler, Li, Sussell, Hale, Broyles, Reinhardt
Carbon monoxide (CO) exposure levels encountered by wildland firefighters (WLFs) throughout their work shift can change considerably within a few minutes due to the varied tasks that are performed and the changing environmental and fire conditions encountered throughout the day…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES

Broyles, Kardous, Shaw, Krieg
Wildland firefighters are exposed to numerous noise sources that may be hazardous to their hearing. This study examined the noise exposure profiles for 264 wildland firefighters across 15 job categories. All 264 firefighters completed questionnaires to assess their use of…
Year: 2019
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES