Larger, more frequent wildfires in arid and semi-arid ecosystems have been associated with invasion by non-native annual grasses, yet a complete understanding of fine fuel development and subsequent wildfire trends is lacking. We investigated the complex relationships among weather, fine fuels, and fire in the Great Basin, USA. We first modeled the annual and time-lagged effects of precipitatio...

This paper describes a wildfire forecasting application based on a 3D virtual environment and a fire simulation engine. A novel open source framework is presented for the development of 3D graphics applications over large geographic areas, offering high performance 3D visualization and powerful interaction tools for the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) community. The application includes a ...

This study investigates how federal, state, and private corporate forest owners in a fire-prone landscape of southcentral Oregon manage their forests to reduce wildfire hazard and loss to high-severity wildfire. We evaluate the implications of our findings for concepts of social–ecological resilience. Using interview data, we found a high degree of "response diversity" (variation in forest mana...

Wildfires can greatly alter the vegetation, soils, and hydrologic processes of watersheds serving as drinking water supplies, which may negatively influence source water quality and treatment. To address wildfire impacts on treatment, a drinking water intake below a burned watershed and an upstream, unburned reference site were monitored following the High Park wildfire (2012) in the Cache la P...

—Wildfire is an important natural process in many stream ecosystems, but the ability of fish to respond to wildfire-related disturbances is increasingly constrained by human activities that fragment and degrade stream habitats. In this study, we used molecular genetic markers (nuclear microsatellites) to examine the effects of wildfire and related disturbances along with habitat fragmentation o...

© The Ecological Society of America www.frontiersinecology.org F 60 years, Smokey Bear has successfully championed fire suppression in the United States, but his success has come at considerable cost. Indeed, it could be likened to the British victory over American rebels at Bunker Hill in 1775, about which it was said, “A few more such victories would surely spell ruin for the victors”. We exa...

To study how fire or herbicide use influences longleaf pine (Pinus palustris Mill.) overstory and understory vegetation, five treatments were initiated in a 5–6-year-old longleaf pine stand: check, biennial arborescent plant control by directed herbicide application, and biennial burning inMarch,May, or July. The herbicide or prescribed fire treatments were applied in 1999, 2001, 2003, and 2005...

Worldwide, the preponderance and severity of wildfires is increasing due to a number of factors, among them changes in temperature and precipitation patterns consistent with climate change. Aside from the acute threat of imminent death, wildfires expose people to a range of harmful pollutants in smoke. Although health effects are well documented for many of these individual pollutants— includin...

A novel wildfire segmentation algorithm is proposed with the help of sample training based 2D histogram θ-division and minimum error. Based on minimum error principle and 2D color histogram, the θ-division methods were presented recently, but application of prior knowledge on them has not been explored. For the specific problem of wildfire segmentation, we collect sample images with manually la...

Wild-land fire fighting is a hazardous job. A key task for firefighters is to observe the “fire front” to chart the progress of the fire and areas that will likely spread next. Lack of information of the fire front causes many accidents. Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to cover wildfire is promising because it can replace humans in hazardous fire tracking and significantly reduce operatio...