Globally, fire maintains many mesic habitats in an open canopy state by killing woody plants while reducing the size of those able to resprout. Where fire is frequent, tree saplings are often suppressed by a "fire trap" of repeated topkill (death of aerial biomoass) and resprouting, preventing them from reaching adult size. The ability to tolerate repeated topkill is an essential life-history t...

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) fire risk research program has several tasks aimed at improving the nuclear power plant fire risk assessment (FRA) state of the art. Current results to date include an evaluation of available test data relevant to the estimation of fire-induced spurious actuation probabilities, FRA methodology issues raised by a review of past fire events, and a fram...

Pine straw harvesting con provide on economic benefit to landowners, but the practice may also change the composition of plant communities. This research was initiated in o 34-yeor-old stand of longleaf pine (Pinus palustris Mill.} established in 1956 to study how pine straw management practices (fertilization, prescribed fire, and straw harvesting) affected plant communities, and herein, effec...

• Historical evidence of recurrent fire in many of the world's biomes suggests that fire may have had profound evolutionary influences on their extant floras. However, the role of fire as a selective force in the origin and evolution of plant traits remains controversial. • Using Bayesian Monte-Carlo-Markov-Chain procedures and calibration points from the fossil record, we generated a dated phy...

Wildfires play a determining role in the composition and structure of many plant and animal communities. On the other hand, climate change is considered to be a major driver of current and future fire regime changes. Despite increases in drought in many areas of the world, the effects of aridity on post-fire colonization by animals have been rarely addressed. This study aims to analyse how a re...

BACKGROUND As one of the most frequently occurring accidents in a chemical plant, a fire accident may occur at any place where transfer or handling of combustible materials is routinely performed. METHODS In particular, a jet fire incident in a chemical plant operated under high pressure may bring severe damage. To review this event numerically, Computational Fluid Dynamics methodology was us...

Fire and grazing can interact to affect the structure and composition of vegetation communities in a manner that may differ from the effects of fire or grazing that occurs in isolation of the other. In order to better understand the effects of a fire-grazing interaction at the level of an individual plant species, we studied the response of a perennial tallgrass prairie forb, Arnoglossum planta...

Plant communities are sensitive to perturbations and may display alternative recovery pathways depending on disturbance history. In sub-boreal lodgepole pine forests of central interior British Columbia, Canada, fire and logging are two widespread landscape disturbances that overlap in many regions. We asked whether cumulative, short-interval disturbance from logging and fire resulted in differ...

The two main assembly processes claimed to structure plant communities are habitat filtering and competitive interactions. The set of species growing in fire-prone communities has been filtered in such a way that species without fire-persistence traits have not successfully entered the community. Because plant traits are evolutionarily conserved and fire traits are correlated with other plant t...

As climate change increases vegetation combustibility, humans are impacted by wildfires through loss of lives and property, leading to an increased emphasis on prescribed burning practices to reduce hazards. A key and pervading concept accepted by most environmental managers is that combustible ecosystems have traditionally burnt because plants are fire adapted. In this opinion article, we expl...