Factors influencing large wildland fire suppression expenditures

2008 ◽  
Vol 17 (5) ◽  
pp. 650 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jingjing Liang ◽  
Dave E. Calkin ◽  
Krista M. Gebert ◽  
Tyron J. Venn ◽  
Robin P. Silverstein
Keyword(s):  
Wildland Fire ◽  
Fire Suppression ◽  
Burned Area ◽  
Private Land ◽  
Fire Size ◽  
Department Of Agriculture ◽  
Factors Influencing ◽  
The Us ◽  
Large Fires ◽  
Parsimonious Model

There is an urgent and immediate need to address the excessive cost of large fires. Here, we studied large wildland fire suppression expenditures by the US Department of Agriculture Forest Service. Among 16 potential non-managerial factors, which represented fire size and shape, private properties, public land attributes, forest and fuel conditions, and geographic settings, we found only fire size and private land had a strong effect on suppression expenditures. When both were accounted for, all the other variables had no significant effect. A parsimonious model to predict suppression expenditures was suggested, in which fire size and private land explained 58% of variation in expenditures. Other things being equal, suppression expenditures monotonically increased with fire size. For the average fire size, expenditures first increased with the percentage of private land within burned area, but as the percentage exceeded 20%, expenditures slowly declined until they stabilised when private land reached 50% of burned area. The results suggested that efforts to contain federal suppression expenditures need to focus on the highly complex, politically sensitive topic of wildfires on private land.

Corrigendum to: Factors influencing large wildland fire suppression expenditures

2012 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jingjing Liang ◽  
Dave E. Calkin ◽  
Krista M. Gebert ◽  
Tyron J. Venn ◽  
Robin P. Silverstein
Keyword(s):  
Wildland Fire ◽  
Fire Suppression ◽  
Burned Area ◽  
Private Land ◽  
Fire Size ◽  
Department Of Agriculture ◽  
Factors Influencing ◽  
The Us ◽  
Large Fires ◽  
Parsimonious Model

There is an urgent and immediate need to address the excessive cost of large fires. Here, we studied large wildland fire suppression expenditures by the US Department of Agriculture Forest Service. Among 16 potential non-managerial factors, which represented fire size and shape, private properties, public land attributes, forest and fuel conditions, and geographic settings, we found only fire size and private land had a strong effect on suppression expenditures. When both were accounted for, all the other variables had no significant effect. A parsimonious model to predict suppression expenditures was suggested, in which fire size and private land explained 58% of variation in expenditures. Other things being equal, suppression expenditures monotonically increased with fire size. For the average fire size, expenditures first increased with the percentage of private land within burned area, but as the percentage exceeded 20%, expenditures slowly declined until they stabilised when private land reached 50% of burned area. The results suggested that efforts to contain federal suppression expenditures need to focus on the highly complex, politically sensitive topic of wildfires on private land.

Minimizing the cost of wildland fire suppression: a model with uncertainty in predicted flame length and fire-line width produced

1994 ◽  
Vol 24 (6) ◽  
pp. 1253-1259 ◽  
Author(s):  
Romain Mees ◽  
David Strauss ◽  
Richard Chase
Keyword(s):  
Line Width ◽  
Wildland Fire ◽  
Fire Suppression ◽  
Flame Length ◽  
Burned Area ◽  
Expected Cost ◽  
Control Time ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Attack Strategy

We describe a model that estimates the optimal total expected cost of a wildland fire, given uncertainty in both flame length and fire-line width produced. In the model, a sequence of possible fire-line perimeters is specified, each with a forecasted control time. For a given control time and fire line, the probability of containment of the fire is determined as a function of the fire-fighting resources available. Our procedure assigns the resources to the fire line so as to minimize the total expected cost. A key feature of the model is that the probabilities reflect the degree of uncertainty in (i) the width of fire line that can be built with a given resource allocation, and (ii) the flame length of the fire. The total expected cost associated with a given choice of fire line is the sum of: the loss or gain of value of the area already burned; the cost of the resources used in the attack; and the expected loss or gain of value beyond the fire line. The latter is the product of the probability that the chosen attack strategy fails to contain the fire and the value of the additional burned area that would result from such a failure. The model allows comparison of the costs of the different choices of fire line, and thus identification of the optimal strategy. A small case study is used to illustrate the procedure.

Distribution of residual vegetation associated with large fires in Alberta

1987 ◽  
Vol 17 (10) ◽  
pp. 1207-1212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin E. Eberhart ◽  
Paul M. Woodard
Keyword(s):  
Shape Index ◽  
Size Class ◽  
Burned Area ◽  
Fire Size ◽  
Size Classes ◽  
Size And Shape ◽  
The Third ◽  
Island Area ◽  
Large Fires

Fire size and shape, number and size of islands of residual vegetation, amount of edge, and distances to residual vegetation were analyzed for 69 fires that burned in Alberta between 1970 and 1983. These fires ranged in size from 21 to 17 770 ha. Distribution of residual vegetation was compared among five fire size classes. Fires in the smallest size class (20–40 ha) did not contain any islands of unburned vegetation. Percent of area within the fire perimeter that was actually disturbed decreased with increasing fire size. The number of unburned islands per 100 ha was highest for the third and fourth largest fire size classes (201–400 and 401–2000 ha). Median island area per fire, fire shape index, and edge index increased with fire size. Percentages of burned area within 100, 200, 300, 400, and 500 m of residual vegetation decreased with increasing fire size. These results indicate decreased potential for natural reforestation and increased benefits to some wildlife habitats as fire size increases.

LANDFIRE: a nationally consistent vegetation, wildland fire, and fuel assessment

2009 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew G. Rollins
Keyword(s):  
Fire Management ◽  
Wildland Fire ◽  
Fire Regimes ◽  
The United States ◽  
Development Programs ◽  
Department Of Agriculture ◽  
Management Planning ◽  
Vegetation Modelling ◽  
The Us ◽  
Data Products

LANDFIRE is a 5-year, multipartner project producing consistent and comprehensive maps and data describing vegetation, wildland fuel, fire regimes and ecological departure from historical conditions across the United States. It is a shared project between the wildland fire management and research and development programs of the US Department of Agriculture Forest Service and US Department of the Interior. LANDFIRE meets agency and partner needs for comprehensive, integrated data to support landscape-level fire management planning and prioritization, community and firefighter protection, effective resource allocation, and collaboration between agencies and the public. The LANDFIRE data production framework is interdisciplinary, science-based and fully repeatable, and integrates many geospatial technologies including biophysical gradient analyses, remote sensing, vegetation modelling, ecological simulation, and landscape disturbance and successional modelling. LANDFIRE data products are created as 30-m raster grids and are available over the internet at www.landfire.gov, accessed 22 April 2009. The data products are produced at scales that may be useful for prioritizing and planning individual hazardous fuel reduction and ecosystem restoration projects; however, the applicability of data products varies by location and specific use, and products may need to be adjusted by local users.

scholarly journals Contrasting large fire activity in the French Mediterranean

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (5) ◽  
pp. 1055-1066 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Ganteaume ◽  
Renaud Barbero
Keyword(s):  
Fire Suppression ◽  
Sharp Decrease ◽  
Weather Conditions ◽  
Fire Spread ◽  
Return Level ◽  
Fire Season ◽  
Burned Area ◽  
The West ◽  
Forest Resilience ◽  
Large Fires

Abstract. In the French Mediterranean, large fires have significant socioeconomic and environmental impacts. We used a long-term georeferenced fire time series (1958–2017) to analyze both spatial and temporal distributions of large fires (LFs; ≥100 ha). The region was impacted in some locations up to six times by recurrent LFs and 21 % of the total area burned by LFs occurred on a surface that previously burned in the past, with potential impact on forest resilience. We found contrasting patterns between the east and the west of the study area, the former experiencing fewer LFs but of a larger extent compared to the latter, with an average time of occurrence between LFs exceeding 4000 ha < 7 years mostly in the eastern coastal area and > 50 years in the west. This longitudinal gradient in LF return level contrasts with what we would expect from mean fire weather conditions strongly decreasing eastwards during the fire season but is consistent with larger fuel cover in the east, highlighting the strong role of fuel continuity in fire spread. Additionally, our analysis confirms the sharp decrease in both LF frequency and burned area in the early 1990s, due to the efficiency of fire suppression and prevention reinforced at that time, thereby weakening the functional climate–fire relationship across the region.

scholarly journals Modelling the role of fires in the terrestrial carbon balance by incorporating SPITFIRE into the global vegetation model ORCHIDEE – Part 1: simulating historical global burned area and fire regimes

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (6) ◽  
pp. 2747-2767 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Yue ◽  
P. Ciais ◽  
P. Cadule ◽  
K. Thonicke ◽  
S. Archibald ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Burned Area ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Observation Data ◽  
Fire Size ◽  
Vegetation Model ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Large Fires ◽  
Global Vegetation ◽  
Area Data

Abstract. Fire is an important global ecological process that influences the distribution of biomes, with consequences for carbon, water, and energy budgets. Therefore it is impossible to appropriately model the history and future of the terrestrial ecosystems and the climate system without including fire. This study incorporates the process-based prognostic fire module SPITFIRE into the global vegetation model ORCHIDEE, which was then used to simulate burned area over the 20th century. Special attention was paid to the evaluation of other fire regime indicators such as seasonality, fire size and fire length, next to burned area. For 2001–2006, the simulated global spatial extent of fire agrees well with that given by satellite-derived burned area data sets (L3JRC, GLOBCARBON, GFED3.1), and 76–92% of the global burned area is simulated as collocated between the model and observation, depending on which data set is used for comparison. The simulated global mean annual burned area is 346 Mha yr−1, which falls within the range of 287–384 Mha yr−1 as given by the three observation data sets; and is close to the 344 Mha yr−1 by the GFED3.1 data when crop fires are excluded. The simulated long-term trend and variation of burned area agree best with the observation data in regions where fire is mainly driven by climate variation, such as boreal Russia (1930–2009), along with Canada and US Alaska (1950–2009). At the global scale, the simulated decadal fire variation over the 20th century is only in moderate agreement with the historical reconstruction, possibly because of the uncertainties of past estimates, and because land-use change fires and fire suppression are not explicitly included in the model. Over the globe, the size of large fires (the 95th quantile fire size) is underestimated by the model for the regions of high fire frequency, compared with fire patch data as reconstructed from MODIS 500 m burned area data. Two case studies of fire size distribution in Canada and US Alaska, and southern Africa indicate that both number and size of large fires are underestimated, which could be related with short fire patch length and low daily fire size. Future efforts should be directed towards building consistent spatial observation data sets for key parameters of the model in order to constrain the model error at each key step of the fire modelling.

Human-related ignitions concurrent with high winds promote large wildfires across the USA

2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (6) ◽  
pp. 377 ◽  
Author(s):  
John T. Abatzoglou ◽  
Jennifer K. Balch ◽  
Bethany A. Bradley ◽  
Crystal A. Kolden
Keyword(s):  
Vapour Pressure ◽  
Vapour Pressure Deficit ◽  
Fire Risk ◽  
Burned Area ◽  
Fuel Moisture ◽  
Wind Speeds ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Large Fires ◽  
High Winds

Large wildfires (>40 ha) account for the majority of burned area across the contiguous United States (US) and appropriate substantial suppression resources. A variety of environmental and social factors influence wildfire growth and whether a fire overcomes initial attack efforts and becomes a large wildfire. However, little is known about how these factors differ between lightning-caused and human-caused wildfires. This study examines differences in temperature, vapour pressure deficit, fuel moisture and wind speed for large and small lightning- and human-caused wildfires during the initial days of fire activity at ecoregion scales across the US. Large fires of both human and lightning origin occurred coincident with above-normal temperature and vapour pressure deficit and below-normal 100-hour dead fuel moisture compared with small fires. Large human-caused wildfires occurred, on average, coincident with higher wind speeds than small human-caused wildfires and large lightning-caused wildfires. These results suggest the importance of winds in driving rapid fire growth that can allow fires to overcome many of the factors that typically inhibit large human-caused fires. Additionally, such findings highlight the interplay between human activity and meteorological conditions and the importance of incorporating winds in modelling large-fire risk in human-dominated landscapes.

Is Arson Associated with Severe Fire Weather in Southern California?

1991 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 97 ◽  
Author(s):  
R Mees
Keyword(s):  
Southern California ◽  
Wildland Fire ◽  
Fire Suppression ◽  
Weather Conditions ◽  
Fire Danger ◽  
Weather Data ◽  
Fire Weather ◽  
The Public ◽  
Severe Fire ◽  
Large Fires

Under severe fire weather conditions arson is believed to be the primary cause of large wildland fires in southern California. Wildland fire suppression personnel and the public use the the expression "This weather brings out the arsonists" to indicate their awareness of the high potential for large arson-caused fires under these conditions. To determine the accuracy of this statement, fire occurrence and weather data were analyzed for four southern California National Forests for a 10-year period (1975–1984). The results showed that the proportion of arson and non-arson person-caused fires remained the same under most fire-danger conditions; however, a much higher percentage of arson fires became large fires when fire danger was severe. Furthermore, the timing of the arsonist contributed to the frequent occurrence of large arson fires. The data presented here refute the idea that most arson fires occur under severe weather conditions and at the same time-validate the utility of maintaining arson prevention programs during most weather conditions.

scholarly journals Two thresholds determine climatic control of forest-fire size in Europe

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (7) ◽  
pp. 9065-9089 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. Loepfe ◽  
A. Rodrigo ◽  
F. Lloret
Keyword(s):  
Fire Suppression ◽  
Weather Conditions ◽  
Meteorological Conditions ◽  
Fuel Load ◽  
Fire Season ◽  
Annual Rainfall ◽  
Climate Change Scenarios ◽  
Fire Size ◽  
Large Fires ◽  
Fire Extent

Abstract. Fire weather indices predict fire extent from meteorological conditions assuming a monotonic function; this approach is frequently used to predict future fire patterns under climate change scenarios using linear extrapolation. However, the relationship between weather and fire extent may potentially depend on the existence of fuel humidity thresholds above which this relationship changes dramatically, challenging this statistical approach. Here we combine the continuous and the threshold approaches to analyze satellite-detected fires in Europe during 2001–2010 in relation to meteorological conditions, showing that fire size response to increasing dryness follows a ramp function, i.e. with two plateaus separated by a phase of monotonic increase. This study confirms that at a continental and a high-resolution temporal scales, large fires are very unlikely to occur under moist conditions, but it also reveals that fire size stops to be controlled by fuel humidity above a given threshold of dryness. Thus, fuel humidity control only applies when fire is not limited by other factors such as fuel load, as large fires are virtually absent in dry regions with less than 500 mm of average annual rainfall, i.e. where fuel amount is insufficient. In regions with sufficient fuel, other factors such as fire suppression or fuel discontinuity can impede large fires even under very dry weather conditions. These findings are relevant under current climatic trends in which the fire season length, in terms of number of days with DC (drought code) values above the observed thresholds (break points), is increasing in many parts of the Mediterranean, while it is decreasing in Eastern Europe and remains unchanged in Central Europe.

Comment—A re-examination of the effects of fire suppression in the boreal forest

2001 ◽  
Vol 31 (8) ◽  
pp. 1462-1466 ◽  
Author(s):  
K Miyanishi ◽  
E A Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Boreal Forest ◽  
Fire Management ◽  
Fire Suppression ◽  
Fire Frequency ◽  
Stand Age ◽  
Reliable Estimate ◽  
Fire Size ◽  
Fire Cycle ◽  
Large Fires ◽  
In Fire

A report by Ward and Tithecott (P.C. Ward and A.G. Tithecott. 1993. Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, Aviation, Flood and Fire Management Branch, Publ. 305.) is frequently cited in the literature as providing evidence of the effects of fire suppression on the boreal forest. The study is based on 15 years of fire data and stand age data from Ontario, Canada. A re-examination of this report reveals serious flaws that invalidate the conclusions regarding effects of fire suppression on fire size and fire frequency. The fire-size data from the unprotected zone are censored in the small size classes because of detection resolution, invalidating comparisons of shapes of the distributions between the protected and unprotected zones. Use of different plotting scales gives the false appearance of large differences in the number of large fires between the two zones. Stand age data are used to show a change in fire frequency in the 20th century, and this change is attributed to fire suppression. However, no evidence is presented to conclude that this change in fire frequency is attributable to fire suppression and not to climate change. The estimate of the current fire cycle is based on too short a record to give a reliable estimate given the variation in annual area burned. Therefore, this report does not present sound evidence of fire suppression effects and should not be cited as such.

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