Disturbances that are strongly linked to global climatic cycles may occur in a regular, predictable manner that affects composition and distribution of ecological communities. The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) influences worldwide precipitation patterns and has occurred with regular periodicity over the last 130 000 years. We hypothesized that ENSO, through effects on local weather condit...

This study used MODIS active fire detections and associated fire radiative power estimates to characterise bush fires in the savanna region of Australia’s Northern Territory. In contrast to other sensors MODIS has dedicated fire channels that rarely saturate over fires, enabling fire detections during the day and estimates of fire radiative power. Using number of dayand night-time fire detectio...

While emissions of pollutants from conventional sources, such as industrial and thermal processes, have been in decline over the last two decades, fires have become major sources for the emission of several contaminants. This review summarises chemical mechanisms pertinent to the formation of prominent pollutants, such as NOx, HCN, HCl, soot, and trace species, such as PCDD/Fs (dioxins). We com...

Fires have raged across southern Europe during the exceptional heat of this summer but in Greece, where they have been particularly severe and widespread, they caught the authorities by surprise. They have been occurring over weeks from late June in the forests of the north to Crete in the south. They are doubly troubling because of Greece's dramatic biodiversity — more than 25 per cent of an e...

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Wildland fire managers deploy suppression resources to bases and dispatch them to fires to maximize the percentage of fires that are successfully contained before unacceptable costs and losses occur. Deployment is made with budget constraints and uncertainty about the daily number, location, and intensity of fires, all of which affect initial-attack success. To address the deployment problem, w...

1. Bark is a vital and very visible part of woody plants, yet only recently has bark characteristics started to be considered as key traits structuring communities and biomes. Bark thickness is very variable among woody plants, and I hypothesize that fire is a key factor selecting for a thick bark, and thus, at the global scale, a significant proportion of the variability in bark thickness is e...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this research is to evaluate the effectiveness of the US Consumer Product Safety Commission's (CPSC) Safety Standard for Cigarette Lighters, which requires that disposable cigarette lighters be resistant to operation by children younger than age 5. METHODS Fire data on children playing with lighters were solicited from selected US fire departments for incidents occurr...

There is increased interest in the use of summer-season fires to limit woody plant encroachment into grasslands, but effects of these fires on grasses are poorly understood. We quantified effects of repeated winter fires, repeated summer fires, and clipping (to simulate grazing) on aboveground total yield, live yield, and percentage of live tissue of C3 Texas wintergrass (Nassella leucotricha [...