Post-fire recruitment by seeds is regarded as an adaptive response in fire-prone ecosystems. Nevertheless, little is known about which heritable seed traits are functional to the main signals of fire (heat and smoke), thus having the potential to evolve. Here, we explored whether three seed traits (pubescence, dormancy and shape) and fire regime modulate seed response to fire cues(heat and smok...

Smoke inhalation is a common cause of cyanide poisoning during fires, resulting in injury and even death. In many cases of smoke inhalation, cyanide has increasingly been recognized as a significant toxicant. The diagnosis of cyanide poisoning remains very difficult, and failure to recognize it may result in inadequate or inappropriate treatment. Findings suggesting cyanide toxicity include the...

BACKGROUND Residential fires caused at least 67 deaths and 2,500 non-fatal injuries to children aged 0-16 in the United Kingdom in 1998. Smoke alarm ownership is associated with a reduced risk of residential fire death. OBJECTIVES We evaluated interventions to promote residential smoke alarms, to assess their effect on smoke alarm ownership, smoke alarm function, fires and burns and other fir...

The present study investigates effects of wildfire emissions on air quality in Europe during an intense fire season that occurred in summer 2003. A meso-scale chemistry transport model CHIMERE is used, together with ground based and satellite aerosol optical measurements, to assess the dispersion of fire emissions and to quantify the associated radiative effects. The model has been improved to ...

Computational vision-based fire and flame detection has drawn significant attention in the past decade with camera surveillance systems becoming ubiquitous. Several signal and image processing methods are developed for the detection of fire, flames and smoke in large and open spaces with a range of up to 30 meters to the surveillance camera in visible-range video. This paper proposes a new appr...

Recent work has shown that the use of torpor for energy conservation increases after forest fires in heterothermic mammals, probably in response to the reduction of food. However, the specific environmental cues for this increased torpor expression remain unknown. It is possible that smoke and the novel substrate of charcoal and ash act as signals for an impending period of starvation requiring...

In this paper, the impact of vehicles in road tunnel on smoke spread in case of fire is illustrated using the FDS (Fire Dynamics Simulator) system. FDS is a CFD-based fire field model capable to simulate fire in various environments capturing a big variety of physical processes related to fire. A set of simulations of fire in a 300 m long two-lane single directional road tunnel with longitudina...

Smoke is a leading cause of death in fire. To minimize the potential harm from the smoke hazards in the course of a fire, a rational virtual reality (VR)-based fire training simulator taking full account of the various aspects of smoke hazards has been developed and is described herein. In this simulator, a visualization technique based on volume rendering and fire dynamics data has been especi...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Germination studies of species from fire-prone habitats are often focused on the role that fire plays in breaking dormancy. However, for some plant groups in these habitats, such as the genus Leucopogon (Ericaceae), dormancy of fresh seeds is not broken by fire cues. In the field, these same species display a flush of seedling emergence post-fire. Dormancy and germination me...