Alpine grazing reduces blazing’ is a widely and strongly held view concerning the effects of livestock grazing on fuels, and therefore fire behaviour and impact, in Australia’s high country landscapes. As a test of this hypothesis, we examined the patterns of burning across the alpine (treeless) landscapes of the Bogong High Plains in Victoria, following the extensive fires of January 2003. Dat...

Effect of fire on phyto-sociology of understorey vegetation in chir pine forests of three different silvological characteristics was compared with pure grassland. 15 grasses, 1 sedge, 5 legumes and 21 non-legumes were recorded in the four study sites. Floristic composition gradually increased from June to August and then declined slowly by October in all the plots. Maximum number of species wa...

data mapped on GIs, and evaluate the performance of image processing algorithm. The real burnt areas and the real In this report we compare the damaged areas by an earthtotally damaged building areas are shown in Figure 2 and quake detected by using image processing from aerial Figure 3, respectively. These data show the damage as arphotographs with the actual damage data, to evaluate the eas, ...

An algorithm to map burnt areas has been developed for SPOT VEGETATION (VGT) data in Australian woodland savannas. A time series of daily VGT images (15 May to 15 July 1999) was composited into 10-day periods by applying a minimum value criterion to the near-infrared band (0.78–0.89 mm). The algorithm was developed using a classification tree methodology that was confirmed as a powerful means o...

AIM To use forensic entomological approach to estimate the post mortem interval (PMI) in burnt remains. METHODS Two experiments were performed in a field in the outskirts of Milan, in winter and summer 2007. Four 60-kg pigs were used: two for each experiment. One pig carcass was burnt until it reached the level 2-3 of the Glassman-Crow scale and the not-burnt carcass was used as a control. In...

Wildfires significantly affect the boreal ecosystem of Siberia. However, records on burnt areas and fire impact are still not satisfactory in Russia. The dense smoke from active burning and the persistent cloud covers impeded the application of optical sensors to the detection of burnt area in Siberia forest during the summer fire season. The high resolution SAR data are of limited use for burn...

We describe a recent case in which an animal was killed, burnt and body parts were sent to the Institute for identifying species and the method used for extracting DNA from burnt tissues. Two mitochondrial gene cytochrome b and 16s rRNA were used for species identification. Sequence analysis revealed that the burnt sample was of a Hyaena (Hyaena hyaena), a Schedule III animal according to the W...

Fire is a recurrent disturbance in savanna vegetation and savanna species are adapted to it. Even so, fire may affect various aspects of plant ecology, including phenology. We studied the effects of a spatially heterogeneous fire on the reproductive phenology of two dominant woody plant species, Miconia albicans (Melastomataceae) and Schefflera vinosa (Araliaceae), in a savanna area in South-ea...