Treesearch

The Wildland Fire Assessment System (WFAS, www.wfas.net) is a one-stop-shop giving wildland fire managers the ability to assess fire potential ranging in scale from national to regional and temporally from 1 to 5 days. Each day, broad-area maps are produced from fire weather station and lightning location networks. Three products are created using 24 hour lightning location data: Dry Lightning/Dryness, Dry Lightning/Estimated Rain and Potential Lightning Ignition. The Dry Lightning/Estimated Rain map is also available in a Google Earth KMZ format along with regional subset maps based on...

This study estimated the economic costs associated with morbidity from the wildfires that occurred in 2007 in southern California. We used the excess number of hospital admissions and emergency department visits to quantify the morbidity effects and used medical costs to estimate the economic impact. With data from 187 hospital facilities and 140 emergency departments located in five counties in southern California, we found evidence of significant acute adverse health reactions to wildfire-smoke exposure. Specifically, we found approximately 80 excess respiratory-related hospital admission...

People can take extraordinary measures to protect that which they view as sacred. They may refuse financial gain, engage in bloody, inter-generational conflicts, mount hunger strikes and even sacrifice their lives. These behaviors have led researchers to propose that religious values shape our identities and give purpose to our lives in a way that secular incentives cannot. However, despite the fact that many cultural and religious frameworks already emphasize sacred aspects of our natural world, applying all of that motivating power of "the sacred" to environmental protectionism seems to...

Wood cribs are often used as ignition sources for room fire tests. A wood crib may also apply to studies of burning rate in wildland fires, because wildland fuel beds are porous and three dimensional. A unique aspect of wildland fires is the ubiquitous presence of wind. However, very little is known about what effect the increased ventilation has on the burning rate of cribs in either the densely- or loosely-packed regime. Experiments were performed with seven cribs designs with a range of porosities and two fuel element sizes: 0.64 cm and 1.27 cm. These cribs were burned in a wind tunnel...

Wood cribs are often used as ignition sources for room fire tests and the well characterized burning rates may also have applications to wildland fires. The burning rate of wildland fuel structures, whether the needle layer on the ground or trees and shrubs themselves, is not addressed in any operational fire model and no simple model exists. Several relations exist in the literature for the burning rate of wood cribs, but the cribs used to generate them were built with fairly limited geometries. This work explores the burning rate of cribs with a wide variety of geometries and aspect...

We used spatial optimization to analyze alternative restoration scenarios and quantify tradeoffs for a large, multifaceted restoration program to restore resiliency to forest landscapes in the western US. We specifically examined tradeoffs between provisional ecosystem services, fire protection, and the amelioration of key ecological stressors. The results revealed that attainment of multiple restoration objectives was constrained due to the joint spatial patterns of ecological conditions and socioeconomic values.We also found that current restoration projects are substantially suboptimal,...

The Fire, Fuel, and Smoke Science Program (FFS) of the U.S. Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station focuses on fundamental and applied research in wildland fire, from fire physics and fire ecology to fuels management and smoke emissions. Located at the Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory in Montana, the scientists, engineers, technicians, and support staff in FFS conduct national and international, cutting-edge work in wildland fire research and develop research and management tools and applications. Their work is designed to improve understanding of wildland fire as well as safe and...

Using data from destructively sampled Douglas-fir and lodgepole pine trees, we evaluated the performance of regional volume and component biomass equations in terms of bias and RMSE. The volume and component biomass equations were calibrated using three different adjustment methods that used: (a) a correction factor based on ordinary least square regression through origin (OLS-RTO method); (b) a correction factor based on OLS with intercept (OLS-WI method); and, (c) an inverse approach. The regional volume equations performed fairly well and produced similar results as the locally fitted...

Forest owners worldwide are increasingly interested in managing forests to provide a broad suite of Ecosystem services, balancing multiple objectives and evaluating management activities in terms of Potential tradeoffs. We describe a multi-objective mathematical programming model to quantify tradeoffs in expected sediment delivery and the preservation of Northern spotted owl (NSO) habitat following fuel treatments to reduce fire hazard in the Deschutes National forest in Central Oregon, USA. Our model integrates the management objective of fire hazard reduction and the provision of...

Environmental barriers and habitat fragmentation can restrict gene flow, leading to genetic divergence among animal populations. The golden snub-nosed monkey, Rhinopithecus roxellana, is endemic to China, and ranges across 4 provinces. However, over the past 40 years its populations have become fragmented. We investigated the genetic diversity, demographic history and population structure of R. roxellana in 5 reserves in one of its strongholds, the Qinling Mountain forests of Shaanxi. We collected genetic material from 11 monkey bands (a group of individuals containing multiple 1-male...