The costs and losses of wildfires: a literature survey

Thomas, Douglas S.; Butry, David T.; Gilbert, S.; Webb, David H.; Fung, Juan F.

doi:10.6028/nist.sp.1215

Cited by 145 publications

(91 citation statements)

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“…Looking towards our modern challenge of both adapting to and actively managing fire regimes, Williamson et al (2016a) provide a timely review on the health impacts of prescribed and wild fires. The human health impacts of fire smoke are increasingly recognized (Johnston et al 2012, Bowman and Johnston 2014, Reid et al 2016, Cascio 2018), a fact that can dramatically increase the estimated economic burden of landscape fires (Jones and Berrens 2017, Thomas et al 2017). Prescribed fires are designed to reduce fuel loads and thus the severity of uncontrolled fires, but can also have negative consequences on human health in downwind regions.…”

Section: Reviewsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Fires are necessary for the persistence of key ecosystems, continue to be used as a land management tool, and are not going away. But with an ever-increasing human population, continued expansion into wildlands, and changing climate, fires are an acute and increasing danger to our infrastructure, natural and cultural resources, human health, ecosystem resilience, and climate itself (Johnston et al 2012, Ward et al 2012, Bowman and Johnston 2014, Thomas et al 2017. It has never been more important for us to understand the patterns, drivers, and effects of fires across Earth's diverse biomes.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Focus on changing fire regimes: interactions with climate, ecosystems, and society

Rogers

Balch

Goetz

et al. 2020

Environ. Res. Lett.

137

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Fire is a complex Earth system phenomenon that fundamentally affects vegetation distributions, biogeochemical cycling, climate, and human society across most of Earth's land surface. Fire regimes are currently changing due to multiple interacting global change drivers, most notably climate change, land use, and direct human influences via ignition and suppression. It is therefore critical to better understand the drivers, patterns, and impacts of these changing fire regimes now and continuing into the future. Our review contributes to this focus issue by synthesizing results from 27 studies covering a broad range of topics. Studies are categorized into (i) Understanding contemporary fire patterns, drivers, and effects; (ii) Human influences on fire regimes; (iii) Changes in historical fire regimes; (iv) Future projections; (v) Novel techniques; and (vi) Reviews. We conclude with a discussion on progress made, major remaining research challenges, and recommended directions.

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Section: Reviewsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Focus on changing fire regimes: interactions with climate, ecosystems, and society

Rogers

Balch

Goetz

et al. 2020

Environ. Res. Lett.

137

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“…Wildfire is a worldwide phenomenon that takes place in any vegetated area regardless of national fire-fighting management strategies and causing significant damages for the environment, properties and human lives [1]. Wildfires have a strong social and economical impact calling for a deeper understanding of their 15 behaviour for controlling the risk and managing their suppression [2].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fire-spotting generated fires. Part I: The role of atmospheric stability

Egorova

Trucchia

Pagnini

2020

Applied Mathematical Modelling

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This is the first part of two papers concerning fire-spotting generated fires. In this part we deal with the impact of macroscale factors, such as the atmospheric stability, and in the second part we deal with mesoscale factors, such as the flame geometry. For this study we adopt an approach where the motion of the front is split into a drifting part and a fluctuating part. The drifting part, that can be provided by choosing an existing operational model, is here based on the levelset method in analogy with WRF-SFIRE model. The fluctuating part, that is the result of a comprehensive statistical description of the physics of the system and includes the random effects, is here physically parametrized to include turbulent hot-air transport and firebrand landing distance. In order to highlight the net effects of the random contributions due to turbulence and firebrand flying, a simplified model without fire-atmosphere coupling is considered. Numerical simulations show that the atmospheric stability is an important factor for wildfire propagation. In particular, unstable conditions boost the number of fire-spotting generated fires at small elapsed times as well as the strength of turbulence leading to rapid merging and the formation of unburned islands surrounded by the fire. Stability conditions have then an effect on the risk and the management associated to fire-spotting generated fires. In fact, with stable conditions (corresponding for example to the night-time) the turbulence is not strong enough to merge the fires and, at large elapsed times, this results into a higher number of independent fires but lower burned area with respect to un- stable conditions (corresponding for example to the day-time) when the push of turbulence leads to faster merging resulting into a lower number of independent fires but higher burned area. Finally, with stable conditions less fire fronts need to be managed at short time, but more fire fronts need to be managed than with unstable conditions that however show a higher risk because of the merging of independent fires.

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“…Wildfires are one of the costliest and deadliest natural disasters across the world, especially in the US West region. The immediate impacts include damage to millions of hectares of forest resources, evacuation of thousands of people, burning of homes and devastation of infrastructure, and most importantly, threatening the lives of people [1]. Moreover, wildland fires may also disrupt forestry operations, which produce wood fiber and biomass fuels, and other forms of agriculture, by spreading into farms and damaging ecosystems with negative consequences on water quality and other ecosystem services [2].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Moreover, wildland fires may also disrupt forestry operations, which produce wood fiber and biomass fuels, and other forms of agriculture, by spreading into farms and damaging ecosystems with negative consequences on water quality and other ecosystem services [2]. National institute of standards and technology (NIST) estimates that the annual cost of wildfire management ranges from $7.6 billion to $62.8 billion, while the annual losses caused by wildfires are much higher, ranging from $63.5 billion to $285.0 billion [1]. In the US, wildfire suppression costs exceeded $2 billion in 2017, breaking the all-time record [3].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Wildfire Monitoring in Remote Areas using Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Afghah

Razi

Chakareski

et al. 2019

IEEE INFOCOM 2019 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops (INFOCOM WKSHPS)

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In this paper, we propose a drone-based wildfire monitoring system for remote and hard-to-reach areas. This system utilizes autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with the main advantage of providing on-demand monitoring service faster than the current approaches of using satellite images, manned aircraft and remotely controlled drones. Furthermore, using autonomous drones facilitates minimizing human intervention in risky wildfire zones. In particular, to develop a fully autonomous system, we propose a distributed leader-follower coalition formation model to cluster a set of drones into multiple coalitions that collectively cover the designated monitoring field. The coalition leader is a drone that employs observer drones potentially with different sensing and imaging capabilities to hover in circular paths and collect imagery information from the impacted areas. The objectives of the proposed system include: i) to cover the entire fire zone with a minimum number of drones, and ii) to minimize the energy consumption and latency of the available drones to fly to the fire zone. Simulation results confirm that the performance of the proposed system-without the need for inter-coalition communications-approaches that of a centrally-optimized system. 1 .

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The costs and losses of wildfires: a literature survey

Cited by 145 publications

References 0 publications

Focus on changing fire regimes: interactions with climate, ecosystems, and society

Focus on changing fire regimes: interactions with climate, ecosystems, and society

Fire-spotting generated fires. Part I: The role of atmospheric stability

Wildfire Monitoring in Remote Areas using Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

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