Fire is a naturally occurring process of most terrestrial ecosystems as well as a tool for changing land use. Since the beginning of history humans have used fire as a mechanism for creating areas suitable for agriculture and settlement. As fires threaten human dominated landscapes, fire risk itself has become a driver of landscape change, impacting landscapes through land use regulations and f...

Fire is a key component of many land use systems and a determinant of land change. There is a growing concern that climate change will cause more catastrophic fires, but in many areas the impacts will be mediated by human land use practices. In African savannas, for example, fires are frequent and research finds low inter-annual variability in burned areas in places with highly variable rainfal...

Previous research has shown that fires burn certain land cover types disproportionally to their abundance. We used quantile regression to study land cover proneness to fire as a function of fire size, under the hypothesis that they are inversely related, for all land cover types. Using five years of fire perimeters, we estimated conditional quantile functions for lower (avoidance) and upper (pr...

Because of the increasing anthropogenic fire activity, understanding the role of land-use in shaping wildfire regimes has become a major concern. In the last decade, an increasing number of studies have been carried out on the relationship between land-use and wildfire patterns, in order to identify land-use types where fire behaves selectively, showing a marked preference (or avoidance) in ter...

The Itai-Itai disease case is one of four major pollution-related lawsuits occurring in Japan after World War H. This paper, which is based on investigations of the pollution source, the Kamioka mine, considers (1) the history of the disturbances to the environment caused by the Kamioka mine; (2) the Itai-Itai disease suit; (3) the pollution nprevention measures and methods of the Kamioka mine ...

We present a methodology to detect terrain mobilization in the years following a fire using multitemporal Landsat TM imagery. Furthermore, we show the spectral evolution of the land cover since fire occurrence, and analyze the feasibility of detecting the type of land cover a number of years after fire occurrence. The methodology developed here is a spectral change identification technique base...

The incidence of escaped agricultural fire has recently been increasing in the Western Amazon, driven by climate variability, land use change, and changes in patterns of residency and land occupation. Preventing and mitigating the negative impacts of fire in the Amazon require a comprehensive understanding not only of what the drivers of fire activity are, but also how these drivers interact an...

Fire is one of the earliest and most common tools used by humans to modify the earth surface. Landscapes in the Yucatán Peninsula are composed of a mosaic of old growth subtropical forest, secondary vegetation, grasslands, and agricultural land that represent a well-documented example of anthropogenic intervention, much of which involves the use of fire. This research characterizes land use sys...

Land cover is affected by many factors including economic development, climate and natural disturbances such as wildfires. The ability to evaluate how fire regimes may alter future vegetation, and how future vegetation may alter fire regimes, would assist forest managers in planning management actions to be carried out in the face of anticipated socio-economic and climatic change. In this paper...

Indonesia has experienced rapid land use change over the last few decades as forests and peatswamps have been cleared for more intensively managed land uses, including oil palm and timber plantations. Fires are the predominant method of clearing and managing land for more intensive uses, and the related emissions affect public health by contributing to regional particulate matter and ozone conc...