Treesearch

Smog chamber experiments were conducted to investigate the chemical and physical transformations of organic aerosol (OA) during photo-oxidation of open biomass burning emissions. The experiments were carried out at the US Forest Service Fire Science Laboratory as part of the third Fire Lab at Missoula Experiment (FLAME III). We investigated emissions from 12 different fuels commonly burned in North American wildfires. The experiments feature atmospheric and plume aerosol and oxidant concentrations; aging times ranged from 3 to 4.5 h. OA production, expressed as a mass enhancement ratio...

Wildland fire is a natural disturbance that affects the distribution and abundance of native fishes in the Rocky Mountain West (Rieman and others 2003). Fire can remove riparian vegetation, increasing direct solar radiation to the stream surface and leading to warmer summer water temperatures (fig. 1). Fire can also consume vegetation and organic biomass on the forest floor, changing hydrologic flows, stream quality, and fish habitat suitability.

In the mid 1980s I was asked to create a fire regime map of the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness Area for the Bitterroot National Forest fire management staff. The well known fire historian Steve Barrett had already completed most of the work by synthesizing all available fire history results by forest habitat type, so I figured it would be easy to create a map of habitat types and then assign fire regimes to each habitat type. However, when the mapped fire regimes were compared to actual fire history field data, I found that the map’s accuracy was disturbingly low, ranging from 40% to 60%. At...

The character of a wildland fire can change dramatically in the presence of another nearby fire. Understanding and predicting the changes in behavior due to fire-fire interactions cannot only be life-saving to those on the ground, but also be used to better control a prescribed fire to meet objectives. In discontinuous fuel types, such interactions may elicit fire spread where none otherwise existed. Fire-fire interactions occur naturally when spot fires start ahead of the main fire and when separate fire events converge in one location. Interactions can be created intentionally during...

Each year, large areas are burned in wildfires across the Western United States. Assessing the ecological effects of these fires is crucial to effective postfire management. This requires accurate, efficient, and economical methods to assess the severity of fires at broad landscape scales (Brennan and Hardwick 1999; Parsons and others 2010). While postfire assessment tools exist (such as the burned area reflectance classification (BARC) maps produced in the burned area emergency response (BAER) process), land managers need new tools that easily and quickly forecast the potential severity...

There are many reasons to hold a conversation, among them: information download, information exchange, selection of a course of action, consensus-building, and exploration. Dialogue is a particular type of conversation that seeks to explore a subject in order to generate new ideas and insights. It is based on the recognitions that (1) the critical issues of today are so complex that it is impossible for one person to comprehend, let alone solve and (2) game-changing insights, new behaviors and new organizational structures can emerge from a diverse group of people thinking together.

Over the past decade, the wildland fire community has developed a number of innovative methods for conducting a review following escape of a prescribed fire. The stated purpose been to identify methods that not only meet policy requirements, but to reduce future escapes. Implicit is the assumption that a review leads to learning. Yet, as organizational learning expert David Garvin notes, a lesson is not learned just because the reasons and context for an error has been explored; true learning only occurs when behaviors change on the ground.

Safety is typically talked about in a context of the absence of injury. The field of resilience engineering has been advocating that we think about safety differently, by taking a systems view and begin to see how people create safety in unsafe systems by managing risk. There is growing recognition that safety is an emergent behavior of our complex system of human performance. A model of human performance focused on resilience and adaptation will be presented.

Federal agency policy requires documentation and analysis of all wildland fire response decisions. In the past, planning and decision documentation for fires were completed using multiple unconnected processes, yielding many limitations. In response, interagency fire management executives chartered the development of the Wildland Fire Decision Support System (WFDSS).

A new decision support tool, the Wildland Fire Decision Support System (WFDSS) has been developed to support risk-informed decision-making for individual fires in the United States. WFDSS accesses national weather data and forecasts, fire behavior prediction, economic assessment, smoke management assessment, and landscape databases to efficiently formulate and apply information to the decision making process. Risk-informed decision-making is becoming increasingly important as a means of improving fire management and offers substantial opportunities to benefit natural and community resource...