Books about Fire prone from Amazon.com

The magnificent stands of old-growth trees that characterize the forests of western North America depend on periodic fires for their creation or survival. Deprived of that essential disturbance process eventually they die, leaving an overcrowded growth of smaller trees vulnerable to intense blazes and epidemics of insects and disease.

In Mimicking Nature's Fire, forest ecologists Stephen Arno and Carl Fiedler present practical solutions to the pervasive problem of deteriorating forest conditions in western North America. Advocating a new direction in forest management, they explore the promise of "restoration forestry" -- an ecologically based approach that seeks to establish forest structures in which fire can once again serve as a beneficial process rather than as a destructive aberration.

The book begins with an overview of fundamentals: why traditional forestry tried to exclude fire from forests, why that attempt failed, and why foresters and ecologists now recognize the need for management based on how natural ecosystems operate. Subsequent chapters consider: how fire's historic role provides a foundation for designing restoration strategies; why a hands-off approach will not return forests to their historical condition; how management goals influence the strategies used in restoration forestry.

The second part of the book presents case studies of restoration projects in the western United States and Canada, representing different forest types, different historic fire regimes, and contrasting management goals. For each project, the authors describe why and how the project is being conducted, profile forest conditions, and describe methods of treatment. They also report what has been accomplished, identify obstacles to restoration, and offer their candid but understanding evaluation. Mimicking Nature's Fire concludes by placing restoration forestry in the broad context of conserving forests worldwide and outlining factors critical for its success.

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This digital document is an article from African Review of Business and Technology, published by Thomson Gale on October 1, 2006. The length of the article is 2339 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Oil sector demands safety and security: generating sets have to meet special demands in the fire-prone hydrocarbons industry, including the offshore operators of West Africa. Here, we outline the safety precautions that have to be taken from initial construction to operation.(Generating Sets)
Author: Gale Reference Team
Publication:African Review of Business and Technology (Magazine/Journal)
Date: October 1, 2006
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 42 Issue: 9 Page: 40(3)

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This digital document is a journal article from Acta Oecologica, published by Elsevier in . The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
Dahlia coccinea grows on fire-prone xerophilous shrubland, on a lava field located in Mexico City. Two kinds of experiments were performed to test the role of fire and environmental heterogeneity on germination. The first experiment tested the effect of environmental conditions (constant and alternating temperatures, cold stratification and light). The second one tested the effects of fire and high temperatures (dry and moist heat) on germination. Seeds of Dahlia were indifferent to light. The seeds showed physiological dormancy, which was lost by after-ripening or by gibberellins. During simulated fires, dry seeds tolerated high temperatures of short duration and also withstood prolonged exposure to 60 ^oC. Dry heat treatment reduced the mechanical restriction for embryo growth in dormant seeds. Ash and prolonged exposure to moist heat inhibited germination. Exogenous gibberellins reversed the deleterious effects of prolonged exposure to moist heat. The effect of cold stratification was related to the seeds' physiological stage and to light conditions; stratification in the dark reduced germination. Seeds of D. coccinea could tolerate, evade, or be slightly favored by the effects of low intensity fires occurring in their habitat. Seed responses to treatments suggest that the spatially heterogeneous lava field could provide a wide variety of micro-sites where physiological dormancy could be broken and during fires seeds could maintain their viability and subsequently germinate and/or develop a seed bank. .
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This digital document is a journal article from Forest Ecology and Management, published by Elsevier in 2005. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
The ponderosa pine forests of the Colorado Front Range, USA, have historically been subjected to wildfires. Recent large burns have increased public interest in fire behavior and effects, and scientific interest in the carbon consequences of wildfires. Remote sensing techniques can provide spatially explicit estimates of stand structural characteristics. Some of these characteristics can be used as inputs to fire behavior models, increasing our understanding of the effect of fuels on fire behavior. Others provide estimates of carbon stocks, allowing us to quantify the carbon consequences of fire. Our objective was to use discrete-return lidar to estimate such variables, including stand height, total aboveground biomass, foliage biomass, basal area, tree density, canopy base height and canopy bulk density. We developed 39 metrics from the lidar data, and used them in limited combinations in regression models, which we fit to field estimates of the stand structural variables. We used an information-theoretic approach to select the best model for each variable, and to select the subset of lidar metrics with most predictive potential. Observed versus predicted values of stand structure variables were highly correlated, with r^2 ranging from 57% to 87%. The most parsimonious linear models for the biomass structure variables, based on a restricted dataset, explained between 35% and 58% of the observed variability. Our results provide us with useful estimates of stand height, total aboveground biomass, foliage biomass and basal area. There is promise for using this sensor to estimate tree density, canopy base height and canopy bulk density, though more research is needed to generate robust relationships. We selected 14 lidar metrics that showed the most potential as predictors of stand structure. We suggest that the focus of future lidar studies should broaden to include low density forests, particularly systems where the vertical structure of the canopy is important, such as fire prone forests. .
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This digital document is a journal article from Soil Biology and Biochemistry, published by Elsevier in 2004. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
A thorough understanding of the role of microbes in C cycling in relation to fire is important for estimation of C emissions and for development of guidelines for sustainable management of dry ecosystems. We investigated the seasonal changes and spatial distribution of soil total, dissolved organic C (DOC) and microbial biomass C during 18 months, quantified the soil CO"2 emission in the beginning of the rainy season, and related these variables to the fire frequency in important dry vegetation types grassland, woodland and dry forest in Ethiopia. The soil C isotope ratios (@d^1^3C) reflected the 15-fold decrease in the grass biomass along the vegetation gradient and the 12-fold increase in woody biomass in the opposite direction. Changes in @d^1^3C down the soil profiles also suggested that in two of the grass-dominated sites woody plants were more frequent in the past. The soil C stock ranged from being 2.5 (dry forest) to 48 times (grassland) higher than the C stock in the aboveground plant biomass. The influence of fire in frequently burnt wooded grassland was evident as an unchanged or increasing total C content down the soil profile. DOC and microbial biomass measured with the fumigation-extraction method (C"m"i"c) reflected the vertical distribution of soil organic matter (SOM). However, although SOM was stable throughout the year, seasonal fluctuations in C"m"i"c and substrate-induced respiration (SIR) were large. In woodland and woodland-wooded grassland C"m"i"c and SIR increased in the dry season, and gradually decreased during the following rainy season, confirming previous suggestions that microbes may play an important role in nutrient retention in the dry season. However, in dry forest and two wooded grasslands C"m"i"c and SIR was stable throughout the rainy season, or even increased in this period, which could lead to enhanced competition with plants for nutrients. Both the range and the seasonal changes in soil microbial biomass C in dry tropical ecosystems may be wider than previously assumed. Neither SIR nor C"m"i"c were good predictors of in situ soil respiration. The soil respiration was relatively high in infrequently burnt forest and woodland, while frequently burnt grasslands had lower rates, presumably because most C is released through dry season burning and not through decomposition in fire-prone systems. Shifts in the relative importance of the two pathways for C release from organic matter may have strong implications for C and nutrient cycling in seasonally dry tropical ecosystems. .
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This digital document is an article from California Planning & Development Report, published by Thomson Gale on November 1, 2007. The length of the article is 1141 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Mitigation, rather than avoidance, continues to dominate in fire-prone California.(Insight)
Author: William Fulton
Publication:California Planning & Development Report (Newsletter)
Date: November 1, 2007
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 22 Issue: 11 Page: 1(2)

Distributed by Thomson Gale.
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