Wildfire can impose a direct impact on human health under climate change. While the potential impacts of climate change on wildfires and resulting air pollution have been studied, it is not known who will be most affected by the growing threat of wildfires. Identifying communities that will be most affected will inform development of fire management strategies and disaster preparedness programs...

BACKGROUND Forests store large amounts of carbon in forest biomass, and this carbon can be released to the atmosphere following forest disturbance or management. In the western US, forest fuel reduction treatments designed to reduce the risk of high severity wildfire can change forest carbon balance by removing carbon in the form of biomass, and by altering future potential wildfire behavior in...

Climate influences forests directly and indirectly through disturbance. The interaction of climate change and increasing area burned has the potential to alter forest composition and community assembly. However, the overall forest response is likely to be influenced by species-specific responses to environmental change and the scale of change in overstory species cover. In this study, we sought...

Overstory and understory data were collected over a 15-year period (1996–2011) before and after seed tree logging in 1996 and an accidental wildfire in 2006 in a young developing mixed-oak forest in central Pennsylvania. The mature forest overstory was dominated by chestnut oak (Quercus montana) followed by northern red oak (Quercus rubra), black oak (Quercus velutina), scarlet oak (Quercus coc...

BACKGROUND In 2012, Colorado experienced one of its worst wildfire seasons of the past decade. The goal of this study was to investigate the relationship of local PM2.5 levels, modeled using the Weather Research and Forecasting Model with Chemistry, with emergency department visits and acute hospitalizations for respiratory and cardiovascular outcomes during the 2012 Colorado wildfires. METHO...

Since fuel load is a major factor influencing wildfire risk, the standard approach to build related hazard maps is mainly grounded on land-cover data. However, the risk level is also influenced by other factors interacting nonlinearly, such as wind, fuel moisture, ignition sources and topography. For these reasons, an increasingly used approach for the computation of hazard maps involves the ex...

Substantial investments in fuel management activities on national forests in the western US are part of a national strategy to reduce human and ecological losses from catastrophic wildfire and create fire resilient landscapes. Prioritizing these investments within and among national forests remains a challenge, partly because a comprehensive assessment that establishes the current wildfire risk...

Annually emerging cicadas are a numerically and ecologically dominant species in Southwestern riparian forests. Humans have altered disturbance regimes that structure these forests such that floods are less common and wildfires occur more frequently than was historically the case. Impacts of these changes on primary consumers such as riparian cicadas are unknown. Because cicadas are consumed by...

We describe recent advances in biophysical and social aspects of risk and their potential combined contribution to improve mitigation planning on fire-prone landscapes. The methods and tools provide an improved method for defining the spatial extent of wildfire risk to communities compared to current planning processes. They also propose an expanded role for social science to improve understand...

The reactivity of metals associated with ash from wood collected from the Valles Caldera National Preserve, Jemez Mountains, New Mexico, was assessed through a series of laboratory experiments. Microscopy, spectroscopy, diffraction, and aqueous chemistry measurements were integrated to determine the chemical composition of wood ash and its effect on water chemistry. Climate change has caused dr...