Large, infrequent wildfires cause dramatic ecological and economic impacts. Consequently, they deserve special attention and analysis. The economic significance of large fires is indicated by the fact that approximately 94 percent of fire suppression costs on U.S. Forest Service land during the period 19802002 resulted from a mere 1.4 percent of the fires (Strategic Issues Panel on Fire Suppres...

INTRODUCTION In 2007 wildfires ravaged Southern California resulting in the largest evacuation due to a wildfire in American history. We report how these wildfires affected emergency department (ED) visits for respiratory illness. METHODS We extracted data from a Kaiser Permanente database for a single metropolitan community ED. We compared the number of visits due to respiratory illness at t...

The idea that wildfires play an integral role in maintaining healthy forests has begun to change the ways that scientists, managers, and the general public view fire policy and programs. New approaches to forest management that seek to integrate natural disturbances with the provision of goods and services valued by people impose a greater need for a full accounting of the economic effects of w...

Catastrophic wildfires have become more frequent in the last few decades. The standard depiction in the media of fires as a disaster that has to be avoided and stopped at all cost fails to do justice to a more complex ecological balance of destruction and new growth. The emerging discipline of pyrogeography aims to gain a holistic understanding of the role that fire plays in nature and the ways...

Results from a regional air quality forecast model, AIRPACT-3, are compared to OMI tropospheric NO2 integrated column densities for an 18 month period over the Pacific Northwest. AIRPACT column densities are well correlated (r = 0.75) to cloud-free (<35%) retrievals of tropospheric NO2 for monthly averages without wildfires, but are poorly correlated (r = 0.21) with significant model overpredic...