Every year in the United States wildfires destroy hundreds of homes and cause millions of dollars in damage. From January through May of this year, for example, 2,702 wildfires scorched 198,228 acres in Florida amidst one of the worst droughts in a century. Although wildfires can actually be good for the environment, helping it to stay healthy and restore itself, they can have harmful human con...

a r t i c l e i n f o Keywords: Regional climate modeling Wildfire potential Drought KBDI Soil moisture NDVI Regional climate modeling is a technique for simulating high-resolution physical processes in the atmosphere, soil and vegetation. It can be used to evaluate wildfire potential by either providing meteorological conditions for computation of fire indices or predicting soil moisture as a ...

The number of particles and their size distributions were measured in a rural area, during the summer, using a PCASP-X. The aim was to study the influence of wildfires on particle size distributions. The comparative studies carried out reveal an average increase of around ten times in the number of particles in the fine mode, especially in sizes between 0.10 and 0.14 μm, where the increase is o...

The time series data of 31 wildfires in 2012 in the US were analyzed. The fractal dimensions (FD) of the wildfires during spreading were studied and their geological features were identified. A growth model based on the cellular automata method is proposed here. Numerical study was performed and is shown to give good agreement with the fractal dimensions and scaling behaviors of the correspondi...

Recent fire seasons in the western United States are some of the most damaging and costly on record. Wildfires in the wildland-urban interface on the Colorado Front Range, resulting in thousands of homes burned and civilian fatalities, although devastating, are not without historical reference. These fires are consistent with the characteristics of large, damaging, interface fires that threaten...

We used a natural experiment to test whether wildfire smoke induced changes in the vertical distribution of zooplankton in Lake Tahoe by decreasing incident ultraviolet radiation (UV). Fires have a variety of effects on aquatic ecosystems, but these impacts are poorly understood and have rarely been observed directly. UV is an important driver of zooplankton vertical migration, and wildfires ma...

Using Geographic Information Systems and US Forest Service data, we examined relationships between prescribed burning (from 1979 to 2000) and the incidence, size, and intensity of wildfires (from 1995 to 2000) in a landscape containing formerly fire-suppressed, closed-canopy hardwood and pine-hardwood forests. Results of hazard (failure) analyses did not show an increased likelihood of large, s...

The first wildfires in sudden oak death-impacted forests occurred in 2008 in the Big Sur region of California, creating the rare opportunity to study the interaction between an invasive forest pathogen and a historically recurring disturbance. To determine whether and how the sudden oak death pathogen, Phytophthora ramorum, survived the wildfires, we completed intensive vegetation-based surveys...

Pulse ecological events have major impacts on regional and global biogeochemical cycles, potentially inducing a vast set of cascading ecological effects. This study analyzes the widespread reproductive event of bamboo (Melocanna baccifera) that occurred in the Arakan Mountains (Southeast Asia) from 2005 to 2011, and investigates the possible relationship between massive fuel loading due to bamb...