Treesearch

San Diego County, California, holds the records for the largest area burned and greatest number of structures destroyed in California. This paper analyzes 102 years of fire history, population growth, and weather records from 1910 through 2012 to examine the factors that are driving the wildfire system. Annual area burned is compared with precipitation during the winter preceding the summer-fall fire season and with a five-year running average precipitation. All fires over 4 000 ha from 1950 through 2012 are examined for fuel age at the section of origin, fuel type, and weather, including...

Wildland fire managers must frequently make meaning from chaos in order to protect communities and infrastructure from the negative impacts of fire. Fire management personnel are increasingly turning to science to support their experience-based decision-making processes and to provide clear, confident leadership for communities frequently exposed to risk from wildfire. The inclusion of science into their thought processes helps these decisions to be more consistent, accurate, reliable and defendable in an environment where the risk and impact of incidents continues to increase.

Management activities, applied over broad scales, can potentially affect attributes of fire regimes including fire severity. Wilderness landscapes provide a natural laboratory for exploring effects of management because in some federally designated wilderness areas the burning of naturally ignited fires is promoted. In order to better understand the contribution of fire management activities to fire effects, we examined patterns of severity across a management gradient defined by wilderness-non-wilderness boundaries in a northern Rocky Mountain study region. We identified a significant...

Designation of safety zones is a primary duty of all wildland firefighters. Unfortunately, information regarding what constitutes an adequate safety zone is inadequately defined. Measurements of energy release from wildland fires have been used to develop an empirically based safety zone guideline. The basis for this work is described here.

Towers and poles supporting power transmission and telecommunication lines have collapsed due to heating from wildland fires. Such occurrences have led to interruptions in power or communication in large municipal areas with associated social and political implications as well as increased immediate danger to humans. Unfortunately, no studies address the question of what is the appropriate clearance needed to prevent damage to the conductors and support towers by wildland fires. This study presents preliminary findings from two independent studies focused on this question. Findings suggest...

Over the past two decades, wildland fire professionals have been confronted with worsening conditions and complex challenges that cry out for change and new ways of thinking. However, change requires a framework within which people reliably translate policy into timely, effective action. Doctrine, or a body of teachings, instructions, taught principles, or positions, may represent a framework within which land management agencies and rural fire services might change to confront their challenges.

In an era when preparedness budgets have never been higher, when cooperation between partners has never been better, when predictive models have never been more sophisticated, and when technological support has never been more available ... we are suffering from the worst wildfires since America organized to eliminate the large fire problem at the turn of the last century.

This paper describes the number of fires, area burned, causes and seasonality of fires over a ten year period from 2002-2012 and investigates different fire management strategies and their effectiveness in the Afram headwaters forest reserve in Ghana. Data were collected from interviews of stakeholders in two communities adjacent to the reserve, and from 2002-2012 fire reports of the Ghana National Fire Service and Forest Service Division. For the period studied, nearly all fires were human-caused, and most arose through land use activities such as farming (19 percent) or hunting (15...

Decades of fire suppression have significantly altered the vegetation structure and composition of savannas, woodlands, and forests. The presence of endangered species and other species of conservation concern in these fire-suppressed systems makes re-introducing fire more challenging. In oak-juniper woodlands of central Texas, we are presented with the challenge of re-introducing fire to attempt to increase oak regeneration, while simultaneously not substantially altering the vegetation structure and composition of the burned areas to avoid degrading habitat that is currently occupied by...

We reviewed the literature to synthesize what is known about the use of fire to maintain and restore oak forests, woodlands, and savannas of the upper Midwestern United States, with emphasis on Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Included are (1) known physical and ecological effects of fire on oaks from acorn through seedling, established sapling, and mature stages of the life cycle; (2) the use of fire to modify competitive interactions between oaks and mesic forest species (e.g., maple), between oaks and pines, and between oaks and grasses; (3) interaction of fire with other disturbances...