A small wildfire in San Diego County in 2017 resulted in a big uptick in children visiting the emergency room for breathing problems, according to new research published online in the Annals of the American Thoracic Society.
Toxic environmental agents, to which anyone is involuntarily exposed, represent non-negligible risk for human health and, therefore, environmental contamination has become a theme of primary importance worldwide.
In the effort to mitigate destructive wildfires, wildland managers often fight those uncontrolled fires with prescribed fire — carefully controlled burns to safely eliminate the vegetation that piles up on forest floors and adds to potential fuel. A $2.2 million Department of Defense grant will fund an FSU investigation into the dynamics of smoke from prescribed burns, giving land managers a better understanding of when and how to best use the technique.
As wildfires become deadlier, larger and more expensive, there is strong interest in better risk governance. Managing future wildfire risk requires an interface between human decision processes and knowledge about climate trends related to fire, as well as humans’ abilities to anticipate wildfire potential and mitigation approaches are critical. Several presentations at the 2019 Society for Risk Analysis (SRA) Annual Meeting will explore analyses of past fire seasons, projections for the future and approaches for decision making aimed at mitigating risk.
Researchers have created the first comprehensive database of all the wildfire fuels that have been measured across North America. Ultimately, it can help scientists make more informed decisions about fire and smoke situations.
Under a warming climate, wildfires in Oregon's southern Blue Mountains will become more frequent, more extensive and more severe, according to a new Portland State University-led study.
The Kincade Fire has been burning through Sonoma County, displacing people from their homes and leaving destruction in its wake. It is a stark reminder of the increasingly pressing need for a better understanding of how fires begin and spread. This is where Rodman Linn and his research come in. He develops and uses computational models of the coupled interaction between the wildfires and surrounding atmosphere at Los Alamos National Laboratory. In the November 2019 issue of Physics Today, Linn describes a few of the many ways that fluid dynamics controls the behavior of fires.
Tips for this month include: • More heart valve patients now are able to choose minimally invasive procedures instead of open heart surgery. • Our experts tell how to protect your lungs during wildfire season. • Cedars-Sinai scored a perfect 100 on the Human Rights Campaign's Healthcare Equality Index. • 3D mammograms are becoming more popular and could save more lives. • Men's Health experts available to discuss "Movember" topics. • Flu experts also available
Wildfires continue to burn throughout Southern California, forcing many people to evacuate their homes and workplaces. Even if you don't live in an evacuation zone, smoke from the fires can pose a serious health risk.
A Q&A with Berkeley Lab indoor air scientists on protecting homes, schools, and other buildings, from air pollution during wildfires.
Wrapping a building in a fire-protective blanket is a viable way of protecting it against wildfires, finds the first study to scientifically assesses this method of defense.
In the wake of recent wildfires that have ravaged northern and central California, a new study finds that the severity of fire activity in the Sierra Nevada region has been sensitive to changes in climate over the past 1,400 years. The findings
Sierra Nevada forests are losing plant diversity due to high-severity fires, according to a study from the University of California, Davis. These fires are turning patches of forest into shrub fields -- indefinitely, in some cases.
Capturing the full scale of the fires requires cooperation between scientists and on-the-ground reporters, Matthew Hayek, an environmental studies professor, explains.
Irvine, Calif., Sept. 17, 2019 – An interdisciplinary team of scientists at the University of California, Irvine has developed a new technique for predicting the final size of a wildfire from the moment of ignition. Built around a machine learning algorithm, the model can help in forecasting whether a blaze is going to be small, medium or large by the time it has run its course – knowledge useful to those in charge of allocating scarce firefighting resources.
With wildfires from the Arctic to the Amazon, the issue of wildfires, and the resulting smoke, is in the news. Dr. Cora Lynn Sack, a UW Medicine pulmonologist, comments.
The loss of forest cover in the Amazon has a significant impact on the local climate in Brazil, according to a new study.
With numerous fires raging in ecologically priceless Amazon rainforests, Rutgers University–New Brunswick Professor Laura C. Schneider can comment on current fire patterns (the number of fires and their location), linkages to tropical rain forest ecology and changes in Brazilian land use policies around deforestation.
A team of researchers led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory projected that the combination of climate change and increased wildfires will cause the iconic evergreen conifer trees of Alaska to get pushed out in favor of broadleaf deciduous trees, which shed their leaves seasonally.
Northern Arizona University postdoc Xanthe Walker led a team that found that legacy carbon, while it remained protected from combustion in older tree stands where the historical fire return interval persisted, it burned in tree stands younger than 60 years old, increasing the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere.
The NSF-funded project will focus on how gases, such as ozone, react with pollutants in the atmosphere. The research may help reduce air pollution levels and consequently, human cardiovascular diseases.
Largescale 'disturbances', including fires, harvesting, windstorms and insect outbreaks, which kill large patches of forest, are responsible for more than a tenth of tree death worldwide, according to new research at the University of Birmingham.
Extreme wildfires in British Columbia, Canada, pumped so much smoke into the upper atmosphere in August 2017 that an enormous cloud circled most of the Northern Hemisphere – a finding in the journal Science that will help scientists model the climate impacts of nuclear war. The pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCb) cloud – the largest of its kind ever observed – was quickly dubbed “the mother of all pyroCbs.”
"With predictions of widespread mortality of western U.S. forests under climate change," McCauley states, "our study addresses how large-scale restoration of overly-dense, fire-adapted forests is one of the few tools available to managers that could minimize the adverse effects of climate change and maintain forest cover."
A national address database with geographical coordinates, known as address point data, can help emergency managers warn and evacuate residents during a wildfire.
Canada has been battling a very active and destructive fire season on multiple fronts this year. A warming climate, very dry environment, and more extreme weather including severe thunderstorms has led to massive wildfires throughout the country.
Spotted owl populations are in decline all along the West Coast, and as climate change increases the risk of large and destructive wildfires in the region, these iconic animals face the real threat of losing even more of their forest habitat.
DHS S&T, FEMA and USFA are working closely with the national and international first responder community on the growing problem of fires in the wildland-urban interface (WUI).
Forest management must account for the elevated risk large, hot fires pose to older trees that store more carbon, researchers from NAU, UNM, the U.S. Forest Service and the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society (Ecoss) at Northern Arizona University say in a new opinion piece in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Users and supporters of UC San Diego’s High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network (HPWREN) gathered earlier this month for an update on current projects and plans for the internet-connected cyberinfrastructure of cameras and sensors that have alerted first responders to wildfires in remote areas of greater San Diego.
RSS
Medicine keyboard_arrow_right
Sciencekeyboard_arrow_right
Life keyboard_arrow_right
Business keyboard_arrow_right
Journal News keyboard_arrow_right
By Location keyboard_arrow_right
Meetings, Grants, and Events keyboard_arrow_right