Research Database
Displaying 61 - 80 of 219
Future fire events are likely to be worse than climate projections indicate – these are some of the reasons why
Year: 2024
BackgroundClimate projections signal longer fire seasons and an increase in the number of dangerous fire weather days for much of the world including Australia.AimsHere we argue that heatwaves, dynamic fire–atmosphere interactions and increased fuel availability caused by drought will amplify potential fire behaviour well beyond projections based on calculations of afternoon forest fire danger derived from climate models.MethodsWe review meteorological dynamics contributing to enhanced fire behaviour during heatwaves, drawing on examples of…
Publication Type: Journal Article
An optimization model to prioritize fuel treatments within a landscape fuel break network
Year: 2024
We present a mixed integer programming model for prioritizing fuel treatments within a landscape fuel break network to maximize protection against wildfires, measured by the total fire size reduction or the sum of Wildland Urban Interface areas avoided from burning. This model uses a large dataset of simulated wildfires in a large landscape to inform fuel break treatment decisions. Its mathematical formulation is concise and computationally efficient, allowing for customization and expansion to address more complex and challenging fuel break management problems in diverse landscapes. We…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Biogeographic patterns of daily wildfire spread and extremes across North America
Year: 2024
Introduction: Climate change is predicted to increase the frequency of extreme single-day fire spread events, with major ecological and social implications. In contrast with well-documented spatio-temporal patterns of wildfire ignitions and perimeters, daily progression remains poorly understood across continental spatial scales, particularly for extreme single-day events (“blow ups”). Here, we characterize daily wildfire spread across North America, including occurrence of extreme single-day events, duration and seasonality of fire and extremes, and ecoregional climatic…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Ladder fuels rather than canopy volumes consistently predict wildfire severity even in extreme topographic-weather conditions
Year: 2024
Drivers of forest wildfire severity include fuels, topography and weather. However, because only fuels can be actively managed, quantifying their effects on severity has become an urgent research priority. Here we employed GEDI spaceborne lidar to consistently assess how pre-fire forest fuel structure affected wildfire severity across 42 California wildfires between 2019–2021. Using a spatial-hierarchical modeling framework, we found a positive concave-down relationship between GEDI-derived fuel structure and wildfire severity, marked by increasing severity with greater fuel loads until a…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Five social and ethical considerations for using wildfire visualizations as a communication tool
Year: 2024
BackgroundIncreased use of visualizations as wildfire communication tools with public and professional audiences—particularly 3D videos and virtual or augmented reality—invites discussion of their ethical use in varied social and temporal contexts. Existing studies focus on the use of such visualizations prior to fire events and commonly use hypothetical scenarios intended to motivate proactive mitigation or explore decision-making, overlooking the insights that those who have already experienced fire events can provide to improve user engagement and understanding of wildfire…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A Wildfire Progression Simulation and Risk-Rating Methodology for Power Grid Infrastructure
Year: 2024
As the frequency and intensity of power line-induced wildfires increase due to climate-, human- , and infrastructure-related risk drivers, maintaining power system resilience and reducing environmental impacts become increasingly crucial. This paper presents a comprehensive methodology to assess the susceptibility, vulnerability, and risk of power line-induced wildfires for lines and nodes in an electric grid. The methodology integrates a well-established wildfire spread simulator into power flow analysis through a set of analytical steps. The proposed approach is applied to a case study…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Incorporating pyrodiversity into wildlife habitat assessments for rapid post-fire management: A woodpecker case study
Year: 2023
Spatial and temporal variation in fire characteristics—termed pyrodiversity—areincreasingly recognized as important factors that structure wildlife communitiesin fire-prone ecosystems, yet there have been few attempts to incorporatepyrodiversity or post-fire habitat dynamics into predictive models of animaldistributionsandabundancetosupportpost-firemanagement.Weusetheblack-backed woodpecker—a species associated with burned forests—as a case study todemonstrate a pathway for incorporating pyrodiversity into wildlife habitatassessments for adaptive management. Employing monitoring data (2009–…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Different approaches make comparing studies of burn severity challenging: a review of methods used to link remotely sensed data with the Composite Burn Index
Year: 2023
The Composite Burn Index (CBI) is commonly linked to remotely sensed data to understand spatial and temporal patterns of burn severity. However, a comprehensive understanding of the tradeoffs between different methods used to model CBI with remotely sensed data is lacking. To help understand the current state of the science, provide a blueprint towards conducting broad- scale meta-analyses, and identify key decision points and potential rationale, we conducted a review of studies that linked remotely sensed data to continuous estimates of burn severity measured with the CBI and related…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Deterioration of air quality associated with the 2020 US wildfires
Year: 2023
The wildfires of August and September 2020 in the western part of the United States were characterized by an unparalleled duration and wide geographical coverage. A particular consequence of massive wildfires includes serious health effects due to short and long-term exposure to poor air quality. Using a variety of data sources including aerosol optical depth (AOD) and ultraviolet aerosol index (UVAI), obtained with the Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), Multi-Angle Implementation of Atmospheric Correction (MAIAC) and Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI), combined…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Optimizing the implementation of a forest fuel break network
Year: 2023
Methods and models to design, prioritize and evaluate fuel break networks have potential application in many fire-prone ecosystems where major increases in fuel management investments are planned in response to growing incidence of wildfires. A key question facing managers is how to scale treatments into manageable project areas that meet operational and administrative constraints, and then prioritize their implementation over time to maximize fire management outcomes. We developed and tested a spatial modeling system to optimize the implementation of a proposed 3,538 km fuel break network…
Economic Impacts of Fire, Fuels and Fuel Treatments, Risk Assessment and Analysis, Social and Community Impacts of Fire
Publication Type: Journal Article
An aridity threshold model of fire sizes and annual area burned in extensively forested ecoregions of the western USA
Year: 2023
Wildfire occurrence varies among regions and through time due to the long-term impacts of climate on fuel structure and short-term impacts on fuel flammability. Identifying the climatic conditions that trigger extensive fire years at regional scales can enable development of area burned models that are both spatially and temporally robust, which is crucial for understanding the impacts of past and future climate change. We identified region-specific thresholds in fire-season aridity that distinguish years with limited, moderate, and extensive area burned for 11 extensively forested ecoregions…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Metrics and Considerations for Evaluating How Forest Treatments Alter Wildfire Behavior and Effects
Year: 2023
The influence of forest treatments on wildfire effects is challenging to interpret. This is, in part, because the impact forest treatments have on wildfire can be slight and variable across many factors. Effectiveness of a treatment also depends on the metric considered. We present and define human–fire interaction, fire behavior, and ecological metrics of forest treatment effects on wildfire and discuss important considerations and recommendations for evaluating treatments. We demonstrate these concepts using a case study from the Cameron Peak Fire in Colorado, USA. Pre-fire forest…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Avoided wildfire impact modeling with counterfactual probabilistic analysis
Year: 2023
Assessing the effectiveness and measuring the performance of fuel treatments and other wildfire risk mitigation efforts are challenging endeavors. Perhaps the most complicated is quantifying avoided impacts. In this study, we show how probabilistic counterfactual analysis can help with performance evaluation. We borrow insights from the disaster risk mitigation and climate event attribution literature to illustrate a counterfactual framework and provide examples using ensemble wildfire simulations. Specifically, we reanalyze previously published fire simulation data from fire-prone landscapes…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Using soil moisture information to better understand and predict wildfire danger: a review of recent developments and outstanding questions
Year: 2023
Soil moisture conditions are represented in fire danger rating systems mainly through simple drought indices based on meteorological variables, even though better sources of soil moisture information are increasingly available. This review summarises a growing body of evidence indicating that greater use of in situ, remotely sensed, and modelled soil moisture information in fire danger rating systems could lead to better estimates of dynamic live and dead herbaceous fuel loads, more accurate live and dead fuel moisture predictions, earlier warning of wildfire danger, and better forecasts of…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Long-term mortality burden trends attributed to black carbon and PM2·5 from wildfire emissions across the continental USA from 2000 to 2020: a deep learning modelling study
Year: 2023
Background
Long-term improvements in air quality and public health in the continental USA were disrupted over the past decade by increased fire emissions that potentially offset the decrease in anthropogenic emissions. This study aims to estimate trends in black carbon and PM2·5 concentrations and their attributable mortality burden across the USA.
Methods
In this study, we derived daily concentrations of PM2·5 and its highly toxic black carbon component at a 1-km resolution in the USA from 2000 to 2020 via deep learning that integrated big data from satellites, models, and surface…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Projecting live fuel moisture content via deep learning
Year: 2023
Background: Live fuel moisture content (LFMC) is a key environmental indicator used to monitor for high wildfire risk conditions. Many statistical models have been proposed to predict LFMC from remotely sensed data; however, almost all these estimate current LFMC (nowcasting models). Accurate modelling of LFMC in advance (projection models) would provide wildfire managers with more timely information for assessing and preparing for wildfire risk. Aims: The aim of this study was to investigate the potential for deep learning models to predict LFMC across the continental United States 3 months…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Exploring and Testing Wildfire Risk Decision-Making in the Face of Deep Uncertainty
Year: 2023
We integrated a mechanistic wildfire simulation system with an agent-based landscape change model to investigate the feedbacks among climate change, population growth, development, landowner decision-making, vegetative succession, and wildfire. Our goal was to develop an adaptable simulation platform for anticipating risk-mitigation tradeoffs in a fire-prone wildland–urban interface (WUI) facing conditions outside the bounds of experience. We describe how five social and ecological system (SES) submodels interact over time and space to generate highly variable alternative futures even within…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Performance of Fire Danger Indices and Their Utility in Predicting Future Wildfire Danger Over the Conterminous United States
Year: 2023
Predicting current and future wildfire frequency and size is central to wildfire control and management. Multiple fire danger indices (FDIs) that incorporate weather and fuel conditions have been developed and utilized to support wildfire predictions and risk assessment. However, the scale-dependent performance of individual FDIs remains poorly understood, which leads to large uncertainty in the estimated fire sizes under climate change. Here, we calculate four commonly used FDIs over the conterminous United States using high-resolution (4 km) climate and fuel data sets for the 1984–2019…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Consistent, high-accuracy mapping of daily and sub-daily wildfire growth with satellite observations
Year: 2023
Background: Fire research and management applications, such as fire behaviour analysis and emissions modelling, require consistent, highly resolved spatiotemporal information on wildfire growth progression. Aims: We developed a new fire mapping method that uses quality-assured sub-daily active fire/thermal anomaly satellite retrievals (2003–2020 MODIS and 2012–2020 VIIRS data) to develop a high-resolution wildfire growth dataset, including growth areas, perimeters, and cross-referenced fire information from agency reports. Methods: Satellite fire detections were buffered using a historical…
Publication Type: Journal Article
DUET - Distribution of Understory using Elliptical Transport: A mechanistic model of leaf litter and herbaceous spatial distribution based on tree canopy structure
Year: 2023
Heterogeneity in surface fuels produced by overstory trees and understory vegetation is a major driver of fire behavior and ecosystem dynamics. Previous attempts at predicting tree leaf and needle litter accumulation over time have been constrained in scope to probabilistic models that consider a limited number of key factors influencing tree litter dispersal patterns and decomposition processes. We present a mechanistic model for estimating variation in surface fuels called the Distribution of Understory using Elliptical Transport (DUET). DUET uses a pre-generated voxelated canopy array and…
Publication Type: Journal Article