Treesearch

Wildfire extent is growing in the United States (US), a fact attributable to increasingly favorable weather and climatic conditions and the net result of human interventions. US federal land management agencies act upon the wildfire threat by managing hazardous fuels, discouraging human‐caused ignitions, and suppressing active fires. Costs of these actions are rising, so policy makers and wildland managers seek information that can help them understand the trade‐offs of resource allocations. This study generates new information about potential future wildfire and suppression demands by...

Historically, models and systems for fuels management have been developed independently without a great deal of coordination, leading to varying degrees of overlapping functionality. Additionally, as Gail Wells noted in the December 2009 issue of Fire Science Digest, the onus of reviewing, selecting, and using a specific tool often falls on the fire manager. To increase efficiency, reduce redundancies, and make the tool-selection process easier for fire managers, a solution was needed that incorporated several fuels management tools in one framework. The Joint Fire Science Program, a...

Managing ecosystems in an era of rapid change is inherently challenging not only because of uncertainty in future climate but also due to diverse responses of ecosystems to climate. Projections of ecological transformation alongside information about plausible vegetation trajectories can help land managers explore divergent scenarios and consider how modeled outcomes match their observations. Climate‐analog impact models (AIMs) compare environmental information (e.g., vegetation types) between sets of climatically similar locations to infer change and can be used to identify multiple...

Wildfire activity in the Southeastern United States is shaped by unique ecological and climatic conditions that differ markedly from those in other regions of the country. Despite increasing recognition of fire’s ecological importance and rising risks under climate change, regional-scale projections of wildfire behavior in the Southeast remain limited. In this study, we applied the Large Fire Simulator (FSim), a stochastic, spatially explicit fire behavior model, to simulate ignition, spread, suppression, and containment of wildfires within a Florida flatwoods pyrome under both historical...

Forests can affect stream structure and function, but evaluations linking freshwater biodiversity to watershed-scale forest-stand conditions are limited. We evaluated competing hypotheses about spatial patterns of freshwater biodiversity by combining species inventories of vertebrates and invertebrates from traditional and environmental DNA (eDNA) methods across 24 temperate watersheds of young to old forests (37 to 124 y old). Freshwater taxonomic and functional richness of invertebrates were, on average, 1.2-fold and 1.5-fold higher, respectively, in older forests (>75 y) than in younger...

Horizontally continuous fuel types such as pine litter can sustain flame spread along individual fuel particles, but little is known about how wind affects flame behavior at this fine scale.We conducted experiments to examine flame spread rates along thin horizontal fuel particles (cardboard and pine needles) where wind speed and particle orientation relative to wind direction were varied.The wind speed was controlled by mounting a fuel sample on a rotating disk turning at a specified rate.Video measurements showed that flame spread rates on fuel samples varied with fuel orientation angle...

The ignition of small fuel elements plays a crucial role in fire propagation. These fine fuels are often the first to ignite and serve as a bridge for fire spread to larger scenarios. The moisture content of these fuels significantly affects their flammability and thermal behaviour. In this study, the effect of fuel moisture content (FMC) and orientation on the drying, pyrolysis, ignition, and thermal processes of a cellulose solid fuel is investigated through a series of numerical simulations. In addition, experimental ignition-time measurements were conducted at the U.S. Forest Service...

Crib fires are a way to produce fires with higher repeatability than generally is the case for wildland and urban scenarios and consequently are used to study fire behavior. Models for simulating large-scale fires benefit from characterization against relevant test conditions. Here we describe a modeling and experimental effort to better explore fire dynamics at the larger range of what is achievable in laboratories. The modeling that corresponds to the tests is used to provide parameters to larger-scale transport modeling efforts for climate effects as well as to evaluate modeling under...

Reducing the consumption of single-use plastics is becoming reality in today’s society. More than 300 million tons of plastic waste are generated annually globally, with a significant portion coming from disposable food packaging. The development of sustainable paper-based packaging coated with biopolymers has gained prominence in the packaging sector due to its biodegradability, non-toxicity and biocompatibility properties. These materials offer additional advantages, such as resistance to moisture and oxidation, which increases the durability of packaged food products. Improving the...

The effects of climate warming on phenological patterns and species distributions have been described for many species but understanding how changes in behavior and demography lead to these shifts is less understood. We followed a population of the common frog, Eleutherodactylus coqui, as part of an in-situ field warming experiment (Tropical Responses to Altered Climate Experiment; TRACE), in a humid tropical forest using capture-markrecapture methods. We assessed how growth, body size, and survival varied by warming treatment, sex, and developmental stage of frogs. In warmed plots (+4◦C...