Many houses are at risk of being destroyed by wildfires. While previous studies have improved our understanding of how, when and why houses are destroyed by wildfires, little attention has been given to how these fires started. We compiled a dataset of wildfires that destroyed houses in New South Wales and Victoria and, by comparing against wildfires where no houses were destroyed, investigated...

[1] The tropical Pacific sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies such as La Nina have been an important predictor for wildfires in the southeastern and southwestern U.S. This study seeks seasonal predictors for wildfires in the northwestern U.S., a region with the most intense wildfires among various continental U.S. regions. Singular value decomposition and regression techniques are applied to...

[1] Drought provides a favourable environment for the ignition and spread of intense wildfires. This study examines the opposite relationship between the two natural disasters, that is, the role of wildfires in the development of drought. The case of the 1988 northern U.S. wildfires is investigated. Emissions of smoke particles from the wildfires and the resulting optical depth are estimated us...

The economic and ecological costs of wildfire in the United States have risen substantially in recent decades. Although climate change has likely enabled a portion of the increase in wildfire activity, the direct role of people in increasing wildfire activity has been largely overlooked. We evaluate over 1.5 million government records of wildfires that had to be extinguished or managed by state...

We investigated the impact of climate change on the number of wildfires in the Peak District uplands of northern England. Wildfires in peat can result in severe carbon loss and damage to water supplies, and fighting such fires is difficult and costly in such a remote location. The Peak District is expected to experience warmer, wetter winters and hotter, drier summers. Local weather simulations...

Prescribed fires are a common nature conservation practice. They are executed by several parties with limited coordination among them, and little consideration for wildfire occurrences and habitat requirements of fire-dependent species. Here, we gathered data on prescribed fires and wildfires in Sweden during 2011-2015 to (i) evaluate the importance and spatial extent of prescribed fires compar...

Olsen, Christine S.; Shindler, Bruce A. 2007. Citizen-agency interactions in planning and decisionmaking after large wildfires. Gen. Tech. Rep. PNWGTR-715. Portland, OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station. 37 p. This report reviews the growing literature on the concept of agency-citizen interactions after large wildfires. Because large wildfires h...

Spatial partitioning is commonly used for parallel simulation of spatial–temporal systems, such as simulations of wildfires. Achieving effective spatial partitioning is a challenging task due to the dynamic behavior of the simulation models. This paper presents a partitioning method named profile-based spatial partitioning for parallel simulation of large scale wildfires. The profile-based part...

Research shows that some categories of human-ignited wildfires might be forecastable, due to their temporal clustering, with the possibility that resources could be pre-deployed to help reduce the incidence of such wildfires. We estimated several kinds of incendiary and other human-ignited wildfire forecast models at the weekly time step for tribal land units in the United States, evaluating th...

For more than a century, government wildfire managers have aggressively suppressed wildfires within western U.S. forests. In that time, our understanding of the ecological benefits of wildfire has improved. Nevertheless, it has been politically difficult for managers to limit suppression effort, even for relatively non-threatening wildfires. As wildfires within the western U.S. become more freq...