Wildfires cause devastation on communities, most significantly loss of life. The safety of at-risk populations depends on accurate risk assessment and emergency planning. Evacuation modelling and simulation systems are essential tools for such planning and decision making. During a wildfire evacuation, the behaviour of people is a key factor; what people do, and when they do it, depends heavily...

The quantitative study of wildfire data world wide revealed that wildfires exhibit power-law like frequencyarea distributions. Although models exist to predict the spread of a specific fire, there is as yet no agreement on the mechanism which drives wildfire systems on the landscape scale. A classical model in this context is the Drossel-Schwabl cellular automaton (DS-FFM) which robustly produc...

Assessing impacts of management strategies may allow designing more resistant forests to wildfires. Planning-oriented models to predict the effect of stand structure and forest composition on mortality for supporting fire-smart management decisions, and allowing its inclusion in forest management optimization systems were developed. Post-fire mortality was modeled as a function of measurable fo...

This study is an investigation into the roles of wildfire and changing agricultural practices in controlling the inter-decadal scale trends of suspended sediment production from semi-arid mountainous rivers. In the test case, a decreasing trend in suspended sediment concentrations was found in the lower Salinas River, California between 1967 and 2011. Event to decadal scale patterns in sediment...

The United States is caught in a greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions dilemma as well as an ecological and financial disaster in the western wildfire situation. This region, composed of almost 308 million hectares in 11 States, is almost half (143 mha) managed by the Federal government (USDA-NRCS 1999). The region is largely rural, with some 104 million acres (42 mha) of forest in the National Forest...

A considerable portion of public lands in the United States is at risk of uncharacteristically severe wildfires due to a history of fire suppression. Wildfires already have detrimental impacts on the landscape and on communities in the wildlandurban interface (WUI) due to unnatural and overstocked forests. Strategies to mitigate wildfire risk include mechanical thinning and prescribed burning i...

Disturbances are often expected to magnify effects of disease, but these effects may depend on the ecology, behavior, and life history of both hosts and pathogens. In many ecosystems, wildfire is the dominant natural disturbance and thus could directly or indirectly affect dynamics of many diseases. To determine how probability of infection by the aquatic fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (...

Wildfire management in the United States and elsewhere is challenged by substantial uncertainty regarding the location and timing of fire events, the socioeconomic and ecological consequences of these events, and the costs of suppression. Escalating U.S. Forest Service suppression expenditures is of particular concern at a time of fiscal austerity as swelling fire management budgets lead to dec...

Smoldering and flaming fires, which emit different proportions of organic (OC) and black carbon (BC, in the form of char and soot), have long been recognized in modern wildfire observations but never in a paleo-record, and little is known about their interactions with climate. Here we show that in the late glacial-early Holocene transition period, when the climate was moist, relatively high qua...

BACKGROUND Forest fuel treatments have been proposed as tools to stabilize carbon stocks in fire-prone forests in the Western U.S.A. Although fuel treatments such as thinning and burning are known to immediately reduce forest carbon stocks, there are suggestions that these losses may be paid back over the long-term if treatments sufficiently reduce future wildfire severity, or prevent deforesta...