Even though fewer people die as a result of fire than other natural disasters, such as earthquake, flood, landslide, etc., the average loss of property due to fire is high. Kathmandu Metropolitan City is becoming more vulnerable to fire due to haphazard urbanization and increase in population. To control problems due to fire, systematic studies are necessary, including fire potential mapping an...

Fire is an ecologically significant process in the fire-prone ponderosa pine and mixed conifer forests of the northern Sierra Nevada. Fire regimes are influenced by processes that operate over a range of scales that can be grouped broadly as bottom-up (e.g., topography, forest type) or top-down (e.g., climate variation, human land use) controls. To identify the bottom-up versus top-down control...

In Florida, natural communities require periodic fires for maintenance of their ecological integrity. Because of public concerns, wildfires can no longer be allowed to perform this mandatory function so prescribed burning is essential to manage these plant and animal communities. We discuss the importance of prescribed fire in Florida, outline a history of the state’s interest and involvement i...

Every year approximately half a million hectares of land are burned by wildfires in southern Europe, causing large ecological and socio-economic impacts. Climate and land use changes in the last decades have increased fire risk and danger. In this paper we review the available scientific knowledge on the relationships between landscape and wildfires in the Mediterranean region, with a focus on ...

Covering almost a quarter of Brazil, the Cerrado is the world's most biologically rich tropical savanna. Fire is an integral part of the Cerrado but current land use and agricultural practices have been changing fire regimes, with undesirable consequences for the preservation of biodiversity. In this study, fire frequency and fire return intervals were modelled over a 12-year time series (1997-...

The increasing frequency of large, high-severity fires threatens the survival of old-growth specialist fauna in fire-prone forests. Within topographically diverse montane forests, areas that experience less severe or fewer fires compared with those prevailing in the landscape may present unique resource opportunities enabling old-growth specialist fauna to survive. Statistical landscape models ...

Land managers need cost-effective methods for mapping and characterizing fire fuels quickly and accurately. The advent of sensors with increased spatial resolution may improve the accuracy and reduce the cost of fuels mapping. The objective of this research is to evaluate the accuracy and utility of imagery from the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) satellit...

Growing recognition that periodic fire is critical for maintaining the health of many rangeland ecosystems and concerns over more frequent catastrophic wildfires have focused attention on prescribed fire as an ecosystem restoration and fuel management tool. In states such as Texas, where most land is privately owned, the level of success of outreach activities aimed at expanding the adoption of...

The Boundary Element Method has been applied to calculate stress distribution and stability of underground mines for disposal of chemical waste. A case similar to the Stripa mine in Sweden has been considered. The rock mass was granite, with major fracture zones represented by three families of planes mutually orthogonal and 100 meters distant from each other. The pre and post processor GiD [3]...