The effects of forest fire smoke on sky polarization and animal orientation are practically unknown. Using full-sky imaging polarimetry, we therefore measured the celestial polarization pattern under a smoky sky in Fairbanks, Alaska, during the forest fire season in August 2005. It is quantitatively documented here that the celestial polarization, a sky attribute that is necessary for orientati...

Background and Purpose: The potential impact that climate change may have on fire regime in ecosystems that are not fire-dependent emerges from fires that are nowadays spreading over higher altitudes and northern latitudes. The effects of fire occurrence in high elevation forests of Greece became apparent during the last few years when a number of large forest fires burned a significant number ...

The name caliver stands for CALIbration and VERification of forest fire gridded model outputs. This is a package developed for the R programming language and available under an APACHE-2 license from a public repository. In this paper we describe the functionalities of the package and give examples using publicly available datasets. Fire danger model outputs are taken from the modeling component...

Because of the key role played by fire in structuring boreal forest ecosystems, interactions between vegetation and fire regime may be an important and dynamic control of forest response to climate change. This research uses a series of field observations and experiments in boreal forests to examine the nature of several potential fire and vegetation interactions, and how such interactions may ...

Fire severity varies with forest composition and structure, reflecting micrometeorology and the fuel complex, but their respective influences are difficult to untangle from observation alone. We quantify the differences in fire weather between different forest types and the resulting differences in modeled fire behavior. Collection of in-stand weather data proceeded during two summer periods in...

Positive feedbacks between vegetation and fire disturbance may lead to nonlinear ecosystem responses to variation in fire regime. We used a cellular automaton model of fire|vegetation dynamics based on pine savanna communities to explore the potential for fire|vegetation feedbacks to lead to ecological thresholds and abrupt transitions between alternate ecosystem states. We show that (i) ecosys...

Increased forest density resulting from decades of fire exclusion is often perceived as the leading cause of historically aberrant, severe, contemporary wildfires and insect outbreaks documented in some fire-prone forests of the western United States. Based on this notion, current U.S. forest policy directs managers to reduce stand density and restore historical conditions in fire-excluded fore...

a r t i c l e i n f o High-resolution charcoal and pollen analyses were used to reconstruct a 12,000-yr-long fire and vegetation history of the Tumalo Lake watershed and to examine the short-term effects that tephra deposition have on forest composition and fire regime. The record suggests that, from 12,000 to 9200 cal yr BP, the watershed was dominated by an open Pinus forest with Artemisia as...

concentrated on creating a linear additive GIS model designed to determine fire potential in southeastern United States. Although numerous fire potential models have been developed (Andrews and Queen 2001, Bonazountas et al. 2005, Hernandez-Leal et al. 2006), our model is specifically designed to address distinctive conditions of southern Mississippi. Most of the existing literature on fire mod...

Although contemporary fire regimes in fire-prone Australian savannas are recognised as having major impacts on an array of biodiversity and environmental values, a number of studies have observed significant monsoon rainforest expansion in recent decades. Here we assess the status of a locally extensive endemic monsoon rainforest type, dominated by Allosyncarpia ternata (Myrtaceae), restricted ...