Wildfire ignitions are caused by lightning or a variety of human-related activities. While lightning is the most prevalent ignition source across much of the western United States, human-caused ignitions start the majority of fires in the South and nationwide. The frequency of natural and human-caused wildfires varies significantly according to different biophysical, social, and fire management...

Controlling wildfire suppression expenditures has become a major public policy concern in the United States. However, most policy remedies have focused on the biophysical determinants of suppression costs: fuel loads and weather, for example. We show that two non-biophysical variables—newspaper coverage and political pressure—have a significant effect on wildfire suppression costs. Hausman test...

Population growth in the wildland urban interface (WUI) has put a greater number of houses at risk due to wildfire while often straining the resources of fire suppression agencies and contributing to a dramatic increase in wildfire suppression expenditures. In light of these facts, this paper analyzes the consequences of the public provision of fire suppression in a monocentric city where wildf...

General Comment: This paper describes the effect of wildfire particulate matter on air quality over a large part of Europe in 2003. It uses MODIS daily smoke emission inventory and a simple parameterization of injection altitude to prescribe the wildfire emissions in a meso-scale chemistry transport model. The authors conclude that the wildfire resulted in a significant enhancement of PM10 grou...

This review study synthesizes available literature in epidemiology, economics and wildfirerelated studies to provide essential information for the valuation of health costs associated with wildfire events. We review three areas within these literatures: key health outcomes to be evaluated, association between wildfire smoke and health outcomes, and valuation of health effects. We find that the ...

We evaluated the predictive capacity of a rate of spread model for active crown fires (M.G. Cruz, M.E. Alexander, and R.H. Wakimoto. 2005. Can. J. For. Res. 35: 1626–1639) using a relatively large (n = 57) independent data set originating from wildfire observations undertaken in Canada and the United States. The assembled wildfire data were characterized by more severe burning conditions and fi...

The goal of this paper is to analyze the effect of wildfire hazard risk on residential housing prices in Colorado Springs, Colorado. How does the risk of wildfire impact transaction values, and do buyers and sellers in the residential housing market accurately capitalize their perception of low probability events such as wildfires into the price of a house? Working within the hedonic property m...

Wildfires are a concern for communities throughout the world. They cause millions of dollars in damage and lead to loss of lives. The development of computational models to predict wildfire behavior is necessary to minimize wildfire damages and casualties. Visualizing the data generated from these computational models has many applications including training, strategic planning, data analysis, ...

This report provides managers with the current state of knowledge regarding the effectiveness of fuel treatments for mitigating severe wildfire effects. A literature review examines the effectiveness of fuel treatments that had been previously applied and were subsequently burned through by wildfire in forests and rangelands. A case study focuses on WUI fuel treatments that were burned in the 2...