Fire is a major ecosystem process that has been pervasive across the southern forest landscape on an evolutionary time scale (Watts and Hansen 1988). Wildlife evolved in response to frequent lightning-ignited bums that shaped the biota of the Southeast. Despite the dominant role that fire has played on an evolutionary scale, the use of prescribed fire as a forest wildlife management tool remain...

Fire is the most spectacular natural disturbance that affects the forest ecosystem composition and diversity. Fire has a devastating effect on the landscape and its impact is felt at every level of the ecosystem and it is possible to map forest fire risk zone and thereby minimize the frequency of fire. There is a need for supranational approaches that analyze wide scenarios of factors involved ...

This paper reviews recent research from California on geographic variability in mixed conifer (MC) forest fire regimes. MC forests are typically described as having experienced primarily frequent, low to moderate severity burns prior to fire suppression that created a mosaic of vegetation patches with variable structure. Research throughout California generally supports this view, but recent re...

This paper reviews the possibilities of UAV applications to forest-fire fighting in the typical before-during-after scheme. Before-fire they can be used for monitoring of the vegetation and the estimation of hydric stress and risk index. UAVs can also be applied for forest-fire detection, confirmation, localisation and monitoring. Finally, the UAVs are also useful for the evaluation of the fire...

Fire is a key disturbance agent in the fire-prone mixed conifer and ponderosa pine forests of the southwestern United States. Human activities (i.e., livestock grazing, logging, and fire suppression) have resulted in the exclusion of fire from these forests for the past century and fire exclusion has caused changes in forest structure and composition. This study quantifies spatial and temporal ...

The basic premise behind many projects aimed at wildfire hazard reduction and ecological restoration in forests of the western United States is the idea that unnatural fuel buildup has resulted from suppression of formerly frequent fires. This premise and its implications need to be critically evaluated by conducting area-specific research in the forest ecosystems targeted for fuels or ecologic...

Fire is one of the most important natural disturbance processes in the western United States and ecosystems differ markedly with respect to their ecological and evolutionary relationships with fire. Reference fire regimes in forested ecosystems can be categorized along a gradient ranging from ‘‘fuellimited’’ to ‘‘climate-limited’’ where the former types are often characterized by frequent, lowe...

Fire in the boreal region is the dominant agent of forest disturbance with direct impacts on ecosystem structure, carbon cycling, and global climate. Global and biome-scale impacts are mediated by burn severity, measured as loss of forest canopy and consumption of the soil organic layer. To date, knowledge of the spatial variability in burn severity has been limited by sparse field sampling and...

Frelich, Lee E.; Reich, Peter B.; Peterson, David W. 2015. Fire in upper Midwestern oak forest ecosystems: an oak forest restoration and management handbook. Gen. Tech. Rep. PNW-GTR-914. Portland, OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station. 64 p. We reviewed the literature to synthesize what is known about the use of fire to maintain and restore oak f...

This paper describes the creation of a forest fire history database for part of the Far East region of Asia using remotely sensed data, Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR). The algorithm for burnt scar mapping utilizes an active fire detection technique together with detection of abrupt vegetation damage depicted by time series of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). ...