Treesearch

During recent decades too much focus fell on fire suppression and fire engineering methods. Little attention has been given to understanding the shift in the changing fire weather resulting from the global change in weather patterns. Weather change have gradually changed the way vegetation cover respond to fire occurrence and brought about changes in fire behavior and intensity . In the past two decades there has been an increase in the occurrence of catastrophic fires, fire fighters has lost their lives in the line of duty, the environment was degraded and the livelihood of many people...

Mega wildfires are critical, high-impact events that cause severe environmental, economic and social damage, resulting, in turn, in high-cost suppression operations and the need for mutual support, phased use of resources and the coordinated efforts of civilian government agencies, the armed forces, private companies and the international community. The mega forest fire that struck the Torres del Paine National Park and World Biosphere Reserve in the southern Magallanes region of Chile, in the period from December 2011 to February 2012, was caused by the negligent act of a tourist, in an...

Wildfires can cause significant damage to ecosystems, life and property, and wildfire events that do not involve people and property are becoming rare. With the expansion of the rural– urban interface in Western Australia and elsewhere, objectives of life and property protection become more difficult to achieve. We applied the cost plus net value change (C+NVC) model to a synthetic landscape, representative of the northern jarrah forest of the south west of Western Australia. The most economically efficient level of prescribed burning corresponds to a strategy where 5% of the simulated...

It is widely acknowledged that the fires have caused severe impact in the world, and their frequency and intensity tend to increase as a result of ongoing climate changes which have occurred over the past decades. It should be also noted that the urban-rural interface has attracted the attention of governments by the concentration of the number of fire occurrences and their specificities. The study aimed at determining economic indicators from the determination of the profile of forest fires in the study area during the period 1965 to 2009. Statistical analysis related to the number of...

To assess the impact of different-severity wildfires on bird habitat, habitat quality was determined by analyzing the degree of richness association, abundance and diversity of bird species and vegetation structure (richness, abundance, diversity and coverage). These attributes were quantified with four sampling sites for birds and five for quadrant-centered points respectively, for each of three different conditions: oak forest burned years ago, and burned at low and high severity recently, in an oak-pine forest in Chignahuapan, Puebla, Mexico. More vegetation and birds were found in the...

South-eastern Australia is one of the most fire prone environments on earth. Devastating fires in February 2009 appear to have been off the charts climatically and economically, they led to a new category of fire danger aptly called 'catastrophic'. Almost all wildfire losses have been associated with these extreme conditions and climate change will see an increase in these catastrophic fire danger days. Estimating the economic impacts of these fires is a key input into climate change adaptation decision-making for three key reasons: 1) a fattening of the tail of the fire disaster probabilit...

Assessment of economic losses caused by forest fires is a highly complex but important activity. It is complicated first by the large number of effects, in different periods, brought about in the social, economic and environmental fields. Secondly, the difficulty of assigning a market value to resources such as biodiversity or endangered species should be mentioned. It is important because it allows showing, with numbers, how much is lost each time one of these phenomena occurs, which can help in the decision-making process for resource allocation. This paper presents the methodology used...

Progress made in recent years in fire science, particularly as applied to forest fire protection, coupled with the increased power offered by mathematical processors integrated into computers, has led to important developments in the field of dynamic and static simulation of forest fires. Furthermore, and similarly, econometric models applied to economic evaluation of natural resources have generated algorithms of great scientific consistency that have allowed determining the monetary value of resources that have not traditionally had a commercial or market interaction treatment. VISUAL-SEV...

Fire has been used in Brazil for many years, but the increased use of this tool, combined with natural events and the presence of large forest and agricultural areas, has led to a significant jump in the number of forest fires, most of them caused by accident. To optimize existing resources and to cope with growing demand, action levels were adopted according to the size and complexity of the incident and priorities for fighting forest fires were also set. As part of the attack readiness strategies, the Integrated Multi-agency Operational Coordination Centers (known as CIMANs in Brazil)...

Wildland fire regimes are primarily driven by climate/weather, fuels and people. All of these factors are dynamic and their variable interactions create a mosaic of fire regimes around the world. Climate change will have a substantial impact on future fire regimes in many global regions. Current research suggests a general increase in area burned and fire occurrence but there is a lot of global variability. Recent studies of future global fire weather under different climate change scenarios using several General Circulation Models are reviewed. A widespread increase in future fire weather...