Land managers use prescribed burns to help prevent wildfires and protect the ecosystem. They prefer to burn every few years, but costs, liability and proximity to development prevent them from performing the prescriptive burns.
Scientists find that on the front range of the Colorado Rockies the highest fire risk factors are from privately owned lands and threaten other privately held land and property.
If we can better understand scientifically how wildland fires behave, we’ll have a better chance to accurately predict their evolution.
Kansas Forest Service fire training specialist explains why fires are more difficult and costly to extinguish.
Wildfires across the western United States have been getting bigger and more frequent over the last 30 years – a trend that could continue as climate change causes temperatures to rise and drought to become more severe in the coming decades, according to new research.
Scientists have developed a new computer modeling technique that offers the promise, for the first time, of producing continually updated daylong predictions of wildfire growth throughout the lifetime of long-lived blazes. The technique, developed by a research team led by NCAR, combines detailed computer simulations with newly available satellite observations.
Wildfire smoke is complicated. A new understanding of its many particles and their properties may lead to a clearer vision of Earth's future climate.
The high-speed data transmission network of the UC San Diego-based High-Performance Wireless and Research Education Network (HPWREN) is once again showing its utility as a public safety asset as firefighters battle the 7,000-acre Chariot Fire near Mount Laguna, east of San Diego.
Dylan Schwilk can discuss the anatomy of the Springs Fire north of Los Angeles.
It’s well known that wildfires can leave surface soil burned and barren. But a new team's fiery test found that the hotter the fire — and the denser the vegetation feeding the flames — the less the underlying soil heated up, an inverse effect which runs contrary to previous studies and conventional wisdom.
The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center of The University of Texas at Austin has been selected to grow 700,000-plus loblolly pines to restore wildfire-damaged Bastrop County, home of the endangered Houston toad.
After Columbus’ voyage, burning of New World forests and fields diminished significantly – a phenomenon some have attributed to decimation of native populations. But a University of Utah-led study suggests global cooling resulted in fewer fires because both preceded Columbus in many regions worldwide.
The northern spotted owl, a threatened species in the Pacific Northwest, would actually benefit in the long run from active management of the forest lands that form its primary habitat and are increasingly vulnerable to stand-replacing fire.
How well residents evicted by Western wildfires know their neighbors will likely play a major role in how they cope and rebuild, says a Purdue University expert.
Some regions expected to have more wildfires while others will have fewer.
A dilemma is smouldering-- even as wildfires top the current headlines. New research highlights the practice of aggressive fire suppression by using studies at Lake Tahoe as an active example.
Catastrophic wildfires are on the rise in the western United States and a set of conditions may be contributing to a perfect storm for more fires, according to NAU’s Scott Anderson, professor in the School of Earth Sciences and Environmental Sustainability.
DHS-funded research, with The Dragon, and Baby Dragon, helps define fire standards to protect homes. Yhey are conduction experimental fire research to discover when and how quickly wildfire embers ignite fires in structures along the wildland urban interface, and what we can do to prevent it.
Research by UC Merced Professor Anthony Westerling shows large fires could become annual events by 2050, transforming the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem in fundamental ways
The wildfires currently raging in the southwestern United States bring issues of land management into the public eye. Land management actions, such as prescribed fire, grazing, herbicides, felling trees, and mowing, can restore native plants and reduce wildfire. However, the public’s view of land management and their trust in land management agencies can pose another obstacle.
A new Baylor University study has found that some bird species in the desert southwest are less affected, and in some cases positively influenced, by widespread fire through their habitat. In fact, the Baylor researchers say that fire actually helps some bird species because of the habitat that is formed after a fire is positive for the bird’s prey needs.
This season’s massive Arizona fires making headlines around the globe have destroyed dozens of structures and burned nearly three-quarters of a million acres. They also are contributing to global warming, scientists say, by upsetting the carbon balance while they are burning and for years to come.
Wildfires are increasing in both absolute number and severity in the American southwest and this trend is predicted to continue over decades to come.
A Baylor University expert is available to journalists for interviews about how climate change in the desert southwest will decrease the likelihood of widespread and intense wildfires, such as the one in Arizona, over the next 50 years.
Forest experts have warned for years that millions of small-diameter trees are a threat to the nation’s forests, and the massive Wallow Fire in eastern Arizona is further evidence.
Prescribed fires are often used to control undesirable species and enhance herbaceous biomass production. But what are the results when a wildfire burns out of control? In March 2006, more than 367,000 hectares burned in wildfires known as the East Amarillo Complex that raged in the U.S. Texas Panhandle. By studying the survival and regrowth of plants from these wildfires, scientists can learn more about its effects on the ecosystem.
Land managers know the benefits of prescribed burning of fields, grasslands, and forests, but finding an appropriate time to conduct a burn can pose a problem. If weather doesn’t cooperate in the typical late winter/early spring time frame, a burn may be put off until another year. This can cause increased costs when workload and land management goals are not met.
Alaskan forests used to be key players in Mother Nature’s game plan for regulating carbon dioxide levels in the air. But now, American and Canadian researchers report that climate change is causing wildfires to burn more widely and severely, turning Alaska's black spruce forests from carbon repositories to generators of it.
Thousands of acres of the Carmel Forest, adjacent to the University of Haifa, Israel, were engulfed in flames in the fire that turned into a national tragedy - the largest forest fire in the history of modern Israel. Following is a list of experts.
Clear-cut logging and related road-building in the 1950s and 1960s in southern Oregon's Siskiyou Mountains disrupted soil stability and led to unprecedented soil erosion made worse during heavy rainstorms, report University of Oregon researchers.
Study says recent B.C. wildfires have people wondering: Should I build a house here?
Whether forests are dying back, or just drying out, projections for warming show the Pacific Northwest primed for more wildfires. Fuels built up after a century of suppressing fires have long been pointed to as the reason, but since the early ‘90s climate appears to have become a contributing factor.
Where there are wildfires, there's smoke. And where there is climate change, there may be more--and more intense--wildfires. What does that mean for the health of the people downwind from the smoke?
Wildfires present special health hazards to humans and pets – especially children, the elderly, and those with chronic respiratory problems such as emphysema, asthma, congestive heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and others. Tipsheet available from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.
Wildfire expert Shep Zedaker talks about fire conditions, and the difference a few weeks would make for the Station fire.
Two University of Utah professors are available for interviews about the fires burning in California and Utah.
Smoldering ponderosa pine fires contain alkaloids.
A study of coarse and fine particulate matter (PM) generated by the California wildfires of 2008 suggests a toxicity level greater than that of an equivalent dose of PM in ambient air, as reported in the January 2009 issue of Environmental Health Perspectives. The study adds to growing literature supporting source and component specific differences in toxicity of pollutant particles of a given size, and challenges regulators to consider toxicity as well as mass or size when regulating particle pollution.
A new study reports that charcoal particles left by wildfires in sediments of 35 North American lake beds don't readily support the theory that comets exploding over the continent 12,900 years ago sparked a cooling period known as the Younger Dryas. However, researchers did find clear links between abrupt climate changes and fire activity during the transition between the last Ice Age and the warm interglacial period that began 11,700 years ago.
Wildfires can boost ozone pollution to levels that violate U.S. health standards. A new study by NCAR scientists found that California wildfires in 2007 tripled the number of ozone violations across a broad area.
When confronted with emergencies or natural disasters, such as the wildfires that raged through San Diego and Los Angeles counties last October or the tornadoes that hit the southern U.S. last week, residents often dial 9-1-1 as their first course of action.
A Virginia Tech psychologist said research shows that some individuals who experience a residential or wildfire do develop posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression and distress.
Some of those fighting rampaging California wildfires in late October didn't wield shovels or hoses -- they worked with high-tech tools developed at the University of California, San Diego.
Large-scale fires in a western or southeastern state can pump as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in a few weeks as the state's entire motor vehicle traffic does in a year, according to newly published research by scientists at NCAR and the University of Colorado.
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