Fire is widely used as a traditional habitat management tool in Scotland, but wildfires pose a significant and growing threat. The financial costs of fighting wildfires are significant and severe wildfires can have substantial environmental impacts. Due to the intermittent occurrence of severe fire seasons, Scotland, and the UK as a whole, remain somewhat unprepared. Scotland currently lacks an...

BACKGROUND In late October 2003, a series of wildfires exposed urban populations in Southern California to elevated levels of air pollution over several weeks. Previous research suggests that short-term hospital admissions for respiratory outcomes increased specifically as a result of these fires. OBJECTIVE We assessed the impact of a wildfire event during pregnancy on birth weight among term...

Fires is one of the main types of disturbances that shape ecosystems in the Mediterranean region. However nowadays, climate alterations towards higher temperatures result on increased levels of fire intensity, frequency and spread as well as difficulties for natural regeneration to occur. Thasos Island is one of the Greek islands that has experienced those problems. Since 1984, a series of wild...

BACKGROUND Wildfires are an increasingly important component of the forces that drive the global carbon (C) cycle and climate change as progressive warming is expected in boreal areas. This study estimated C emissions from the wildfires across the Alaskan Yukon River Basin in 2004. We spatially related the firescars to land cover types and defined the C fractions of aboveground biomass and the ...

Forest fires are an important societal problem. They cause extensive damage and substantial funds are spent preparing for and fighting them. This work develops a stochastic model useful for probabilistic risk assessment, specifically to estimate chances of fires at a future time given explanatory variables. Questions of interest include: Are random effects needed in the risk model? and if yes, ...

Western United States forest wildfire activity is widely thought to have increased in recent decades, yet neither the extent of recent changes nor the degree to which climate may be driving regional changes in wildfire has been systematically documented. Much of the public and scientific discussion of changes in western United States wildfire has focused instead on the effects of 19th- and 20th...

Evidence from Los Angeles County in California, USA suggests that the relationships between wildfire burn area and fuel age, temperature, precipitation, and fuel moisture are not linear. Instead, the relationships appear to have thresholds. The data seem to support the notion that fire risk is nearly constant provided various conditions are met: that fuel age and temperature exceed a given thre...

State Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing Science, Jointly Sponsored by the Institute of Remote Sensing Applications of Chinese Academy of Sciences and Beijing Normal University, Institute of Remote Sensing Applications, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] Faculty of Computing, London Metropolitan University, London N7 8DB, UK...

In wildfire science, spotting refers to non-local creation of new fires, due to downwind ignition of brands launched from a primary fire. Spotting is often mentioned as being one of the most difficult problems for wildfire management, because of its unpredictable nature. Since spotting is a stochastic process, it makes sense to talk about a probability distribution for spotting, which we call t...

Wildfire is the one of the prominent disturbance factor in most vegetation zones throughout the world, like forests and grasslands. Wildfires present a challenge for ecosystem management, because they have the potential to be at once beneficial and harmful. On the one hand, wildfires are a natural part of several ecosystems for maintaining their health and diversity in numerous ways, such as re...