A transdisciplinary approach to understanding the health effects of wildfire and prescribed fire smoke regimes

Williamson, Grant J.; Bowman, David M. J. S.; Price, Owen; Henderson, Sarah B.; Johnston, Fay H.

doi:10.1088/1748-9326/11/12/125009

Cited by 102 publications

(73 citation statements)

References 87 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Her notable works include projected health impacts and mortality rates from smoke exposure [166,257]. Her recent works include improved methods to predict the minimum height of forest fire smoke [258] and improving approaches to better understand the health impacts of fires on the public [259].…”

Section: Recognizing Women Leaders In Fire Sciencementioning

confidence: 99%

Recognizing Women Leaders in Fire Science

Smith

Kolden

Prichard

et al. 2018

Fire

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Across the breadth of fire science disciplines, women are leaders in fire research and development. We want to acknowledge some of these leaders to promote diversity across our disciplines. In Fire, we are also happy to announce a new Special Collection, through which we will continue to acknowledge current and future Diversity Leaders in Fire Science by inviting contributions from the leaders in this editorial, among others.Keywords: leadership; women in science The Need to Recognize Women Leaders in Fire ScienceIn 1965, Alice Rossi asked a fundamental question: "Why so few women in science?" [1]. It has long been recognized that women are underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematical (STEM) disciplines, with a substantial dialogue in the literature as to the impacts of such underrepresentation. As representation has increased, the debate now focuses on additional questions of equity in leadership, funding, advancement, and mechanisms of support for female scientists. These questions are embedded in three foundational concepts: (1) all scientists, regardless of gender, deserve equal access to opportunities; (2) the smartest and most talented people (regardless of gender) should be conducting scientific research, such that the most critical breakthroughs and contributions are realized; and (3) to understand and solve complex fire science problems, a broad diversity of perspectives, modes of problem attack, and epistemologies are needed [2]. We also acknowledge the need to recognize other underrepresented voices in the fire science community, such as indigenous and racial minorities, individuals with disabilities, and the LGBTQIA community, who all bring different ways of doing and knowing to science.The reader may understandably ask: Why this journal? In fire science, there is a distinct and critical need to increase the recognition of women. Natural hazards research more broadly has widely recognized that women are more vulnerable to natural disasters, and female scientists in other natural hazard disciplines have brought an important perspective to the research that facilitates understanding and reducing such gender disparities. An equivalent gender dialogue does not yet exist in wildfire science but will be necessary to reduce vulnerabilities (e.g., smoke impacts on health, post-traumatic stress disorder following evacuation) and also understand the unique perspectives women have on wildfire as an ecological process. For example, women globally bear much of the childrearing duties; a key fire science question one might ask is whether acceptance of prescribed fire by communities is gendered based on perceptions of impacts to children? The reader may also question the mixed genders of the authors of this editorial. Many proponents of increased recognition of women in science have highlighted that a major part of the problem has been that not enough male allies stand up publicly for their female colleagues, in part because some are embarrassed, fearful, or even feel, and are so...

show abstract

Section: Recognizing Women Leaders In Fire Sciencementioning

confidence: 99%

Recognizing Women Leaders in Fire Science

Smith

Kolden

Prichard

et al. 2018

Fire

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The trade-offs between prescribed and wildfire smoke are poorly understood and demand transdisciplinary research that considers human health, fire risk reduction, and biodiversity effects [17,18]. Nonetheless, smoke from prescribed fires can cause serious health harms.…”

Section: Wildfire Riskmentioning

confidence: 99%

Can Air Quality Management Drive Sustainable Fuels Management at the Temperate Wildland–Urban Interface?

Bowman

Daniels

Johnston

et al. 2018

Fire

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Sustainable fire management has eluded all industrial societies. Given the growing number and magnitude of wildfire events, prescribed fire is being increasingly promoted as the key to reducing wildfire risk. However, smoke from prescribed fires can adversely affect public health. We propose that the application of air quality standards can lead to the development and adoption of sustainable fire management approaches that lower the risk of economically and ecologically damaging wildfires while improving air quality and reducing climate-forcing emissions. For example, green fire breaks at the wildland-urban interface (WUI) can resist the spread of wildfires into urban areas. These could be created through mechanical thinning of trees, and then maintained by targeted prescribed fire to create biodiverse and aesthetically pleasing landscapes. The harvested woody debris could be used for pellets and other forms of bioenergy in residential space heating and electricity generation. Collectively, such an approach would reduce the negative health impacts of smoke pollution from wildfires, prescribed fires, and combustion of wood for domestic heating. We illustrate such possibilities by comparing current and potential fire management approaches in the temperate and environmentally similar landscapes of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada and the island state of Tasmania in Australia.

show abstract

“…In general, forest fires are perceived negatively for several reasons, such as: (i) loss of forestry revenues [1]; (ii) expedition of global warming through releasing of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere [2]; (iii) destruction of neighborhoods, critical infrastructure, and biodiversity [3]; and (iv) increase in respiratory diseases though deteriorating air quality [4], etc. At the same time, there are some positive aspects including reviving healthy trees, extinguishing pests and diseases, and providing nutrients for better regeneration.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Advanced Forest Fire Danger Forecasting System: Integration of Remote Sensing and Historical Sources of Ignition Data

et al. 2018

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Forest fire is one of the major natural hazards/disasters in Canada and many ecosystems across the world. Here, our objective was to enhance the performance of an existing solely remote sensing-based forest fire danger forecasting system (FFDFS), and its implementation over the northern region of the Canadian province of Alberta. The modified FFDFS was comprised of Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS)-derived daily surface temperature (Ts) and precipitable water (PW), and 8-day composite of normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and normalized difference water index (NDWI), where we assumed that cloud-contaminant pixels would reduce the risk of fire occurrences. In addition, we generated ignition cause-specific static fire danger (SFD) maps derived using the historical human-and lightning-caused fires during the period 1961-2014. Upon incorporating different combinations of the generated SFD maps with the modified FFDFS, we evaluated their performances against actual fire spots during the 2009-2011 fire seasons. Our findings revealed that our proposed modifications were quite effective and the modified FFDFS captured almost the same amount of fires as the original FFDFS, i.e., about 77% of the detected fires on an average in the top three fire danger classes of extremely high, very high, and high categories, where about 50% of the study area fell under low and moderate danger classes. Additionally, we observed that the combination of modified FFDFS and human-caused SFD map (road buffer) demonstrated the most effective results in fire detection, i.e., 82% of detected fires on an average in the top three fire danger classes, where about 46% of the study area fell under the moderate and low danger categories. We believe that our developments would be helpful to manage the forest fire in order to reduce its overall impact.Keywords: human-caused static fire danger map; lightning-caused static fire danger map; normalized difference vegetation index; normalized difference water index; precipitable water; surface temperature

show abstract

A transdisciplinary approach to understanding the health effects of wildfire and prescribed fire smoke regimes

Cited by 102 publications

References 87 publications

Recognizing Women Leaders in Fire Science

Recognizing Women Leaders in Fire Science

Can Air Quality Management Drive Sustainable Fuels Management at the Temperate Wildland–Urban Interface?

An Advanced Forest Fire Danger Forecasting System: Integration of Remote Sensing and Historical Sources of Ignition Data

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About