Wildfires are often governed by rapid changes in seasonal rainfall. Therefore, measuring seasonal rainfall on a temporally finescale should facilitate the prediction of wildfire regimes. To explore this hypothesis, daily rainfall data over a 58-yr period (1950–2007) in south-central Florida were transformed into cumulative rainfall anomalies (CRAs). This transformation allowed precise estimatio...

Climate change and land use change are two major elements of human-induced global environmental change. In temperate grasslands and woodlands, increasing frequency of extreme weather events like droughts and increasing severity of wildfires has altered the structure and dynamics of vegetation. In this paper, we studied the impact of wildfires and the year-to-year differences in precipitation on...

Climate change is expected to increase the frequency and severity of drought and wildfire. Aquatic and moisture-sensitive species, such as amphibians, may be particularly vulnerable to these modified disturbance regimes because large wildfires often occur during extended droughts and thus may compound environmental threats. However, understanding of the effects of wildfires on amphibians in for...

Because of the increasing anthropogenic fire activity, understanding the role of land-use in shaping wildfire regimes has become a major concern. In the last decade, an increasing number of studies have been carried out on the relationship between land-use and wildfire patterns, in order to identify land-use types where fire behaves selectively, showing a marked preference (or avoidance) in ter...

The basic premise behind the retrieval is to iterate the mixing ratios of two aerosol models for each size mode. (Weakly and a strongly absorbing aerosol models are used for the fine mode, sea salt and dust models are used for the coarse mode.) Ideally, the retrieval will produce the mixing ratios that best describe the measured radiances at 3-4 wavelengths. (The mixing ratio of dust and sea sa...

Understanding the environmental controls on historical wildfires, and how they changed across spatial scales, is difficult because there are no surviving explicit records of either weather or vegetation (fuels). Here we show how power laws associated with fire-event time series arise in limited domains of parameters that represent critical transitions in the controls on landscape fire. Comparis...

Biological activity can accelerate soil processes and can thus have profound effects on weathering and the transformation of phosphorus (P). Here we show that the transformation of P is closely linked to soil development across an about 9000 years old soil chronosequence formed through glacial rebound. Easily weathered forms of P such as apatite are rapidly lost from the surface mineral horizon...

Wildfires can importantly affect the ecology and economy of large regions of the world. Effective prevention techniques are fundamental to mitigate their consequences. The design of such preemptive methods requires a deep understanding of the factors that increase the risk of fire, particularly when we can intervene on these factors. This is the case for the maintenance of ecological balances i...

The introduction or modification of land use regulations and sustainability initiatives over the last few decades has arguably increased the complexity of forest planning processes. Given the planning goals of a land management organization, both spatial and temporal characteristics of desired future landscapes may now be important to recognize. In some cases of planning, wildfire plays an impo...

As wildfires becomes an increasingly important issue affecting our nation’s landscapes, fire managers must quickly assess possible adverse fire effects to efficiently allocate resources for rehabilitation or remediation. While burn severity maps derived from satellite imagery can provide a landscape view of relative fire impacts, fire effects simulation models can also provide spatial fire seve...