We investigated the association between rice burning and daily asthma hospitalizations in Butte County, California, from 1983 to 1992. Eighty-two percent of planted rice was burned, with a mean of 555 acres burned on days when burning was permitted. For 60% of the days during this period, no rice burning occurred. Peak burning occurred in fall and spring but was not correlated with criteria pol...

In the western United States, mountain pine beetles (MPBs) have killed pine trees across 71,000 km(2) of forest since the mid-1990s, leading to widespread concern that abundant dead fuels may increase area burned and exacerbate fire behavior. Although stand-level fire behavior models suggest that bark beetle-induced tree mortality increases flammability of stands by changing canopy and forest f...

Hand burns in children, whether isolated or part of massive burns, require special attention. A crucial element in this respect is the preservation and full restoration of hand function. Most cases of severe sequelae after burns are associated with hand burns. From January 2002 to November 2004, 125 children with hand burns and other body burns were treated at the Centre of Burns and Plastic Su...

In 1997 and 1998 uncontrolled fires devastated huge tracts of tropical rainforests in Kalimantan on the island of Borneo in Indonesia. Here we report on results of a comparative study of ERS-2 ATSR hotspot and NOAA-AVHRR hotspot data used to analyse the extent of this disaster. A burned scar map derived from a Landsat TM image acquired after the fires and extensive ground data were used to asse...

Wind erosion of soil is an appreciable but unstudied event following fires in cold desert. We examined aeolian transport of sediment for one year following fire in semiarid shrub steppe of southern Idaho. Sediment collectors were used to determine horizontal mass transport of soil ( ) and saltation sensors and anemometers were used to determine saltation activity (# seconds saltation is detecte...

We report on the numerical separation of burned and unburned vegetation classes using diVerent bi-spectral spaces, based on the analysis of spectro-radiometric data collected in situ and convolved to ve spectral bands at red to mid-infrared (MIR) wavelengths. A combination of two MIR bands was found to have strong spectral separation of burned and unburned samples. Using these bands, a spectral...

Many of the largest wildfires in US history burned in recent decades, and climate change explains much of the increase in area burned. The frequency of extreme wildfire weather will increase with continued warming, but many uncertainties still exist about future fire regimes, including how the risk of large fires will persist as vegetation changes. Past fire-climate relationships provide an opp...

Andrey Krasovskii1*, Nikolay Khabarov1, Mirco Migliavacca2, Florian Kraxner1, Michael Obersteiner1 1International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Schlossplatz 1, 2361 Laxenburg, Austria 2Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Hans-Knöll-Str. 10, 07745 Jena, Germany Abstract: This paper presents a series of improvements to the quantitative modelling of burned areas in Europe under his...

Mercury (Hg) stored in vegetation and soils is known to be released to the atmosphere during wildfires, increasing atmospheric stores and altering terrestrial budgets. Increased erosion and transport of sediments is well-documented in burned watersheds, both immediately post-fire and as the watershed recovers; however, understanding post-fire mobilization of soil Hg within burned watersheds rem...