Treesearch

North American wildfire management teams routinely assess burned area on site during firefighting campaigns; meanwhile, satellite observations provide systematic and global burned-area data. Here we compare satellite and ground-based daily burned area for wildfire events for selected large fires across North America in 2007 on daily timescales. In a sample of 26 fires across North America, we found the Global Fire Emissions Database Version 4 (GFED4) estimated about 80% of the burned area logged in ground-based Incident Status Summary (ICS-209) over 8-day analysis windows. Linear regression...

Accurate information about three-dimensional canopy structure and wildland fuel across the landscape is necessary for fire behaviour modelling system predictions. Remotely sensed data are invaluable for assessing these canopy characteristics over large areas; lidar data, in particular, are uniquely suited for quantifying three-dimensional canopy structure. Although lidar data are increasingly available, they have rarely been applied to wildland fuelsmapping efforts, mostly due to two issues. First, the Landscape Fire and Resource Planning Tools (LANDFIRE) program, which has become the...

Dr. Robert Hawthorne White had a 31 year career researching the fire performance of wood and wood composites at the USDA Forest Products Laboratory. Over his career, Dr. White made substantial contributions to codes, standards, and regulations pertaining to the design of wood structures. This review article summarizes Robert’s major accomplishments as a tribute to his career at the Forest Products Laboratory.

The fibrillation of a bleached kraft eucalyptus pulp was investigated by means of a laboratory-scale disk grinder for the production of cellulose nanofibrils (CNF), while the parameters disk rotating speed, solid loading, and fibrillation duration were varied. The cumulative energy consumption was monitored during fibrillation. The degree of polymerization (DP) and water retention value (WRV) of the resultant cellulose fibrils were determined as measures of the degree of fibrillation, which was also visualized by scanning electron microscopy, field emission-scanning electron microscopy,...

Composite sampling is standard practice for evaluation of preservative retention levels in preservative-treated wood. Current protocols provide an average retention value but no estimate of uncertainty. Here we describe a statistical method for calculating uncertainty estimates using the standard sampling regime with minimal additional chemical analysis. This tool can be used by wood treaters to generate lower prediction intervals that with a certain level of confidence give lower bounds on preservative retention estimates for a future analysis (e.g., by a customer) indicating whether the...

Daily National Fire Danger Rating System (NFDRS) indices are typically associated with the number and final size of newly discovered fires, or averaged over time and associated with the likelihood and total burned area of large fires. Herein we used a decade (2003-12) of NFDRS indices and US Forest Service (USFS) fire reports to examine daily relationships between fire danger and the number and growth rate of wildfires burning within a single predictive service area (PSA) in the Northern Rockies, USA. Results demonstrate that daily associations can be used to: (1) extend the utility of the...

Recent advancements in the use of electronic-nose (e-nose) devices to analyze human breath profiles for the presence of specific volatile metabolites, known as biomarkers or chemical bio-indicators of specific human diseases, metabolic disorders and the overall health status of individuals, are providing the potential for new noninvasive tools and techniques useful to point-of-care clinical disease diagnoses. This exciting new area of electronic disease detection and diagnosis promises to yield much faster and earlier detection of human diseases and disorders, allowing earlier, more...

The influence of Native American land-use practices on vegetation composition and structure has long been a subject of significant debate. This is particularly true in portions of the western United States where tribal hunter-gatherers did not use agriculture to meet subsistence and other cultural needs. Climate has been viewed as the dominant determinant of vegetation structure and composition change over time, but ethnographic and anthropological evidence suggests that Native American land-use practices (particularly through the use of fire) had significant landscape effects on vegetation...

The elastic properties of pit membranes are reported to have important implications in understanding air-seeding phenomena in gymnosperms, and pit aspiration plays a large role in wood technological applications such as wood drying and preservative treatment. Here we present force–displacement measurements for pit membranes of circular bordered pits, collected on a mesomechanical testing system. The system consists of a quartz microprobe attached to a microforce sensor that is positioned and advanced with a micromanipulator mounted on an inverted microscope. Membrane displacement is...

Two isolates of Chlorociboria aeruginascens (Nyl.) Kanouse incubated axenically on aspen wood blocks resulted in 18% and 32% mass loss after 134 wks (2 yrs 8 mo). Aspen wood decayed by C. aeruginascens contained cavities in the S2 layer of the secondary cell wall, similar to Type I soft rot attack, as well as erosion troughs and overall thinning and erosion of wood cell walls, resembling decay by Type II soft rot fungi. Using a selective medium, basidiomycete fungi were isolated from 9 of 17 samples of wood from a variety of tree species colonized and stained by Chlorociboria sp. (putativel...