Research Database
Displaying 41 - 60 of 113
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
Making choices: prioritising the protection of biodiversity in wildfires
Year: 2023
Biodiversity is in chronic decline, and extreme events – such as wildfires – can add further episodes of acute losses. Fires of increasing magnitude will often overwhelm response capacity, and decision-makers need to make choices about what to protect. Conventionally, such choices prioritise human life then infrastructure then biodiversity. Based on shortcomings revealed in the 2019–20 Australian wildfires, we propose a series of linked steps that can be used to identify and prioritise biodiversity assets (including their priority relative to other types of assets), enhance and implement…
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
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
Fire-driven animal evolution in the Pyrocene
Year: 2023
Fire regimes are a major agent of evolution in terrestrial animals. Changing fire regimes and the capacity for rapid evolution in wild animal populations suggests the potential for rapid, fire-driven adaptive animal evolution in the Pyrocene. Fire drives multiple modes of evolutionary change, including stabilizing, directional, disruptive, and fluctuating selection, and can strongly influence gene flow and genetic drift. Ongoing and future research in fire-driven animal evolution will benefit from further development of generalizable hypotheses, studies conducted in highly responsive taxa,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Lizards' response to the sound of fire is modified by fire history
Year: 2023
Highlights • Lizards surviving wildfires are more alert to fire sound than those in unburned areas. • Lizards living in urban areas reacted to fire sound similarly to wildfire survivors. • Both natural and human-driven disturbances can shape the behaviour of animals. • Fires are likely to be an important selective pressure on animal behaviour. Many animals survive wildfires; however, the mechanisms used to detect and respond to fire have been poorly studied. Sensory cues like sight and sound are used to recognize threats (e.g. predators) and elicit escape responses in prey. Similarly, these…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A firebreak placement model for optimizing biodiversity protection at landscape scale
Year: 2023
A solution approach is proposed to optimize the selection of landscape cells for inclusion in firebreaks. It involves linking spatially explicit information on a landscape’s ecological values, historical ignition patterns and fire spread behavior. A firebreak placement optimization model is formulated that captures the tradeoff between the direct loss of biodiversity due to the elimination of vegetation in areas designated for placement of firebreaks and the protection provided by the firebreaks from losses due to future forest fires. The optimal solution generated by the model reduced…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Contemporary (1984–2020) fire history metrics for the conterminous United States and ecoregional differences by land ownership
Year: 2022
Background: Remotely sensed burned area products are critical to support fire modelling, policy, and management but often require further processing before use. Aim: We calculated fire history metrics from the Landsat Burned Area Product (1984–2020) across the conterminous U.S. (CONUS) including (1) fire frequency, (2) time since last burn (TSLB), (3) year of last burn, (4) longest fire-free interval, (5) average fire interval length, and (6) contemporary fire return interval (cFRI). Methods: Metrics were summarised by ecoregion and land ownership, and related to historical and cheatgrass…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Incorporating place-based values into ecological restoration
Year: 2022
Knowledge of how ecocultural landscapes co-evolved, how they were shaped and maintained by local people, and what processes disturbed the landscape should inform the planning, execution, and significance of restoration projects. Indigenous stewardship has resulted in legacies of diverse and productive ecocultural environments. Often, this stewardship has been guided by place-based values, which are informed by Indigenous knowledge, beliefs of equal respect for all ecosystem components, and conduct that sustains resource productivity. We propose that cultivating place-based values in…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Evaluating Satellite Fire Detection Products and an Ensemble Approach for Estimating Burned Area in the United States
Year: 2022
Fire location and burning area are essential parameters for estimating fire emissions. However, ground-based fire data (such as fire perimeters from incident reports) are often not available with the timeliness required for real-time forecasting. Fire detection products derived from satellite instruments such as the GOES-16 Advanced Baseline Imager or MODIS, on the other hand, are available in near real-time. Using a ground fire dataset of 2699 fires during 2017–2019, we fit a series of linear models that use multiple satellite fire detection products (HMS aggregate fire product, GOES-16,…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Modern Pyromes: Biogeographical Patterns of Fire Characteristics across the Contiguous United States
Year: 2022
In recent decades, wildfires in many areas of the United States (U.S.) have become larger and more frequent with increasing anthropogenic pressure, including interactions between climate, land-use change, and human ignitions. We aimed to characterize the spatiotemporal patterns of contemporary fire characteristics across the contiguous United States (CONUS). We derived fire variables based on frequency, fire radiative power (FRP), event size, burned area, and season length from satellite-derived fire products and a government records database on a 50 km grid (1984–2020). We used k-means…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A Survey onMonitoring ofWild Animals during Fires Using Drones
Year: 2022
Forest fires occur for natural and anthropogenic reasons and affect the distribution, structure, and functioning of terrestrial ecosystems worldwide. Monitoring fires and their impacts on ecosystems is an essential prerequisite for effectively managing this widespread environmental problem. With the development of information technologies, unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) are becoming increasingly important in remote monitoring the environment. One of the main applications of drone technology related to nature monitoring is the observation of wild animals. Unmanned aerial vehicles are…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Wildfire controls on land surface properties in mixed conifer and ponderosa pine forests of Sierra Nevada and Klamath mountains, Western US
Year: 2022
This study examines the post-fire biogeophysical and biochemical dynamics after several high-severity wildfires that occurred in mixed conifer and ponderosa pine forest types in the Sierra Nevada and Klamath Mountains regions between 1986 and 2017. We found a consistent pattern of reduced leaf area index (LAI) in the first year after fire, followed by gradual recovery over the subsequent 25 years. Recovery rate varied between forest types. For example, average summer LAI for 16-25 years post-fire was 88% of the pre-fire average for mixed conifers in the Sierra Nevada, 64% for ponderosa pine…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Open Scientific Data: Country-level fire perimeter datasets (2001–2021)
Year: 2022
Fire activity is changing across many areas of the globe. Understanding how social and ecological systems respond to fire is an important topic for the coming century. But many countries do not have accessible fire history data. There are several satellite-based products available as gridded data, but these can be difficult to access and use, and require significant computational resources and time to convert into a usable product for a specific area of interest. We developed an open source software package called Fire Event Delineation for python (FIREDpy) which automatically downloads and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Rapid Growth of Large Forest Fires Drives the Exponential Response of Annual Forest-Fire Area to Aridity in the Western United States
Year: 2022
Annual forest area burned (AFAB) in the western United States (US) has increased as a positive exponential function of rising aridity in recent decades. This non-linear response has important implications for AFAB in a changing climate, yet the cause of the exponential AFAB-aridity relationship has not been given rigorous attention. We investigated the exponential AFAB-aridity relationship in western US forests using a new 1984–2019 database of fire events and 2001–2020 satellite-based records of daily fire growth. While forest-fire frequency and duration grow linearly with aridity, the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Using Landsat Imagery to Assess Burn Severity of National Forest Inventory Plots
Year: 2021
As the frequency and size of wildfires increase, accurate assessment of burn severityis essential for understanding fire effects and evaluating post-fire vegetation impacts. Remotelysensedimagery allows for rapid assessment of burn severity, but it also needs to be field validated.Permanent forest inventory plots can provide burn severity information for the field validation ofremotely-sensed burn severity metrics, although there is often a mismatch between the size andshape of the inventory plot and the resolution of the rasterized images. For this study, we used twodistinct datasets: (1)…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Increasing trends in high-severity fire in the southwestern USA from 1984 to 2015
Year: 2019
In the last three decades, over 4.1 million hectares have burned in Arizona and New Mexico and the largest fires in documented history have occurred in the past two decades. Changes in burn severity over time, however, have not been well documented in forest and woodland ecosystems in the southwestern US. Using remotely sensed burn severity data from 1621 fires (>404 ha), we assessed trends from 1984 to 2015 in Arizona and New Mexico in (1) number of fires and total area burned in all vegetation types; (2) area burned, area of high-severity, and percent of high-severity fire in all forest…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Wildfires as an ecosystem service
Year: 2019
Wildfires are often perceived as destructive disturbances, but we propose that when integrating evolutionary and socioecological factors, fires in most ecosystems can be understood as natural processes that provide a variety of benefits to humankind. Wildfires generate open habitats that enable the evolution of a diversity of shade‐intolerant plants and animals that have long benefited humans. There are many provisioning, regulating, and cultural services that people obtain from wildfires, and prescribed fires and wildfire management are tools for mimicking the ancestral role of wildfires in…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Wild bee diversity increases with local fire severity in a fire‐prone landscape
Year: 2019
As wildfire activity increases in many regions of the world, it is imperative that we understand how key components of fire‐prone ecosystems respond to spatial variation in fire characteristics. Pollinators provide a foundation for ecological communities by assisting in the reproduction of native plants, yet our understanding of how pollinators such as wild bees respond to variation in fire severity is limited, particularly for forest ecosystems. Here, we took advantage of a natural experiment created by a large‐scale, mixed‐severity wildfire to provide the first assessment of how wild bee…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Examining post-fire vegetation recovery with Landsat time series analysis in three western North American forest types
Year: 2019
Background: Few studies have examined post-fire vegetation recovery in temperate forest ecosystems with Landsat time series analysis. We analyzed time series of Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR) derived from LandTrendr spectral-temporal segmentation fitting to examine post-fire NBR recovery for several wildfires that occurred in three different coniferous forest types in western North America during the years 2000 to 2007. We summarized NBR recovery trends, and investigated the influence of burn severity, post-fire climate, and topography on post-fire vegetation recovery via random forest (RF)…
Publication Type: Journal Article