(IFFN No. 25 - July 2001)
Global and regional wildland fire monitoring from space:
Planning a coordinated international effort
Increasing conflagrations of forests and other lands throughout the world during the 1980s and 1990s have made fires in forests and other vegetation emerge as an important global concern. Both the number and severity of wildfires and the application of fire for land-use change, seem to have increased dramatically compared to previous decades of the twentieth century. The adverse consequences of extensive wildfires cross national boundaries and have global impacts. Fire regimes are changing with climate variability and population dynamics. Satellite remote sensing technology has the potential to play an important role for monitoring fires and their consequences, as well as in operational fire management. In response to this need as well as to respond to other needs for more rapid progress in forest observation, in 1997 the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) initiated Global Observation of Forest Cover (GOFC) as an international pilot project to test the concepts of an Integrated Global Observing Strategy. The GOFC program is currently part of the Global Terrestrial Observing System (GTOS). GOFC was designed to bring together data providers and information users to make information products from satellite and in-situ observations of forests more readily available worldwide. Fire Monitoring and Mapping was formed as one of three basic components of GOFC.
A new book volume has been prepared that reviews and synthesizes the existing capabilities of spaceborne sensors to detect and monitor wildland fires, to use remote sensing for early warning of wildland fires and to provide decision support for fire managers and policy makers. This book contains eighteen contributions authored by scientists who represent the most active international research and development institutions, aiming at coordinating and improving international efforts for user- oriented systems and products. These papers were initially presented at a GOFC Fire Workshop held at the Joint Research Centre, Ispra. The volume is a contribution by the GOFC Forest Fire Monitoring and Mapping Implementation Team to the Interagency Task Force, Working Group on Wildland Fire of the UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR).
Ahern, F., J.G.Goldammer, and C. Justice (eds.). 2001. Global and regional vegetation fire monitoring from space: Planning a coordinated international effort. SPB Academic Publishing bv, The Hague, The Netherlands, 302 p. (ISBN 905103140-8) (Order information: $US 70.00. Contact: kugler.spb@wxs.nl)
The Story of the Great Fires of 1910
1910 was America's millenial year of fire. That summer, American nature and American society collided with tectonic force as western wildfires scorched millions of acres, darkened skies in New England, and deposited soot on the ice of Greenland. Farms, mining camps, and rail towns cracked and burned. A survivor said that the towering flames raged with the sound of a thousand trains rushing over a thousand steel trestles. As one ranger put it, the mountains roared.
Stephen Pyne, recognized by the Chicago Tribune as "the world's foremost authority on fire and its role in human culture," tells the whole story of that catastrophic year and its indelible legacy Pyne explains how wildland fires happen and how they are fought, how forests are created then re-created in cycles of burning, and what happens to a landscape when roads, railways, mining camps, logging, and national parks appear. The action distills into a two-day crisis, the “Big Blowup” of 20-21 August 1910, when the fires tripled in size, and focuses in particular on the heroics of Ranger Ed Pulaski, who held his panicked crew at gunpoint in a mine tunnel while the firestorm raged outside.
Pyne brings that astonishing year to life through the experiences and words of the rangers, soldiers, politicians, bureaucrats, scientists, and civilians who faced the fires, fought the flames, and were forever scarred by them. It was the first and greatest test of the fiveyear-old Forest Service. Yet even as seventy-eight firefighters perished, a national debate raged about policy, and especially about the relative merits of firefighting versus fire lighting.
The Great Fires were unlike any American fire before them, and no wildland fire since has fundamentally differed from the pattern they inscribed. Everything we do in this country with respect to forest fire – from the actual tools firefighters still carry to strategies of land management – is rooted in the way we fought the fires of 1910. Geography, nature, and civilization did battle in 1910 in a crazed, lethal struggle that has become one of the great sagas of Americans and their lands. More than a memorable adventure tale, this is the chronicle of a profound event that continues to shape American life.
Pyne, S., 2001, Year of
the Fires: the story of the great fires of 1910, Viking Penguin, 322 p.
(ISBN 0-670-89990-9)
Mapping Wildfires Hazards and Risks
Based on the October 1996 workshop at Pingree Park Colorado, Mapping Wildfires Hazards and Risks is a compilation of the ideas of federal and state agencies, universities, and non-governmental organizations on how to rank and prioritize forested watershed areas that are in need of prescribed fire. This book explains the vital importance of fire for the health and sustainability of a watershed forest and how the past acceptance of fire suspension has consequently led to the nicreased fuel loadings in these landscapes that may lead to more severe future wildfires. Complete with geographic maps, charts, diagramms, and a list of locations where there is the greatest risk of future wildfires. Mapping Wildfires Hazards and Risks will assist you in deciding how to set priorities for land treatment that might reduce the risk of land damage.
Sampson, R. N., Atkinson,
R. D. and Lewis, J. W. (eds.), 2000, Mapping Wildfires Hazards and Risks, Food
Products Press, Bringhampton NY USA, 343 p. (ISBN 1-56022-071-6 –
ISBN 1-56022-073-2)
Mapping Wildfires Hazards and Risks has been co-publised simultaneously as Journal of Sustainable Forestry, Volume 11, Numbers 1/2 2000
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