Global Application of Prescribed Fire provides a first-hand perspective of the various methods and ways people around the world view and use prescribed fire. It covers the logistics, constraints and social dynamics surrounding the intentional use and application of fire by humans, and demonstrates how, why, when and where prescribed fire is used in different regions. Written by international experts, the book has four key objectives: explore new techniques, ideas and thoughts on how to apply prescribed fire from a global perspective; provide regional case studies covering issues that may constrain or enhance prescribed fire projects; stimulate cross-cultural conversations about how fires function in ecosystems; and relate prescribed fire to wildfire regimes with implications for protecting life and property, as well as sustaining local fire cultures and unique fire-dependent flora and fauna. Global Application of Prescribed Fire enhances our understanding and knowledge about the application of prescribed fire. This comprehensive book will provide fire practitioners, researchers, agencies and policymakers with key ecological and managerial insight of how prescribed fires are conducted around the globe.

Global Application of Prescribed Fire provides a first-hand perspective of the various methods and ways people around the world view and use prescribed fire. It covers the logistics, constraints and social dynamics surrounding the intentional use and application of fire by humans, and demonstrates how, why, when and where prescribed fire is used in different regions. Written by international experts, the book has four key objectives: explore new techniques, ideas and thoughts on how to apply prescribed fire from a global perspective; provide regional case studies covering issues that may constrain or enhance prescribed fire projects; stimulate cross-cultural conversations about how fires function in ecosystems; and relate prescribed fire to wildfire regimes with implications for protecting life and property, as well as sustaining local fire cultures and unique fire-dependent flora and fauna. Global Application of Prescribed Fire enhances our understanding and knowledge about the application of prescribed fire. This comprehensive book will provide fire practitioners, researchers, agencies and policymakers with key ecological and managerial insight of how prescribed fires are conducted around the globe.

In this practical and helpful manual, John R. Weir, who has conducted more than 720 burns in four states, offers a step-by-step guide to the systematic application of burning to meet specific land management needs and goals.

Prescribed burning is an important tool throughout Southern forests, grasslands, and croplands. The need to control fire became evident to allow forests to regenerate. This manual is intended to help resource managers to plan and execute prescribed burns in Southern forests and grasslands. A new appreciation and interest has developed in recent years for using prescribed fire in grasslands, especially hardwood forests, and on steep mountain slopes. Proper planning and execution of prescribed fires are necessary to reduce detrimental effects, such as the impacts on air and downstream water quality. Check out these related products: Trees at Work: Economic Accounting for Forest Ecosystem Services in the U.S. South can be found here: https://bookstore.gpo.gov/products/trees-work-economic-accounting-forest-ecosystem-services-us-south Soil Survey Manual 2017 is available here: https://bookstore.gpo.gov/products/soil-survey-manual-march-2017 Quantifying the Role of the National Forest System Lands in Providing Surface Drinking Water Supply for the Southern United States is available here: https://bookstore.gpo.gov/products/quantifying-role-national-forest-system-lands-providing-surface-drinking-water-supply Fire Management Today print subscription is available here: https://bookstore.gpo.gov/products/fire-management-today Wildland Fire in Ecosystems: Fire and Nonnative Invasive Plants can be found here: https://bookstore.gpo.gov/products/wildland-fire-ecosystems-fire-and-nonnative-invasive-plants

This book begins with a brief account of the extraordinary sequence of events that led to emergence of grasslands as major vegetation formations that now occupy some of the driest and hottest and the highest and coldest on earth as well as vast steppes and prairies in more temperate climes. It is the story of grasses successfully competing with forests and woodlands, aided and abetted by grazing herbivores and by humans and their use of fire as a tool. It is a story of adaptation to changing climates and the changing biophysical environments. A major focus of the book is the Palaearctic biogeographic realm that extends over some 45 million km2 and thus more than 1/3 of the terrestrial ice-free surface on Earth. It comprises extensive grasslands of different types and origin, which can be subdivided into (1) natural grasslands with (1a) steppes (climatogenic in dry climates), (1b) arctic-alpine grasslands (climatogenic in cold climates) and (1c) azonal and extrazonal grasslands (pedogenic and topogenic) as well as (2) secondary grasslands created and sustained by human activities, such as livestock grazing, mowing or burning. Grasslands of the Palaearctic do not only form a major basis for the agriculture of the region and thus its food supply, but are also crucial for other ecosystem services and host a supra proportional part of the realm’s plant and animal diversity. To reflect that suitability of grasslands for biodiversity strongly depends on their state, we apply the term High Nature Value grassland to those natural grasslands that are not degraded (in good state) and those secondary grasslands that are not intensified (semi-natural). The situation in a variety of countries where grasslands are evolving under the influence of global climate change is also considered. Case studies are presented on Southern Africa, Eastern Africa, India, China, South America, North America and Australia. The concluding chapter examines a set of themes arising from the chapters that make up the bulk of this book. The following provide a focus: recent history of grassland biomes – brief recap of current thinking and recent trends with special reference to dry grasslands in the Palearctic regions; the current status of grasslands and germplasm resources (biodiversity) – an overview; management systems that ensure sustainability; how to recover degraded grasslands; socio-economic issues and considerations in grassland management; the impacts of environmental problems in grasslands such as future climate change and intensification and the problems/prospects facing pastoralists and other grassland-based livestock producers.

A provocative rethinking of how humans and fire have evolved together over time—and our responsibility to reorient this relationship before it's too late.​ The Pyrocene tells the story of what happened when a fire-wielding species, humanity, met an especially fire-receptive time in Earth's history. Since terrestrial life first appeared, flames have flourished. Over the past two million years, however, one genus gained the ability to manipulate fire, swiftly remaking both itself and eventually the world. We developed small guts and big heads by cooking food; we climbed the food chain by cooking landscapes; and now we have become a geologic force by cooking the planet. Some fire uses have been direct: fire applied to convert living landscapes into hunting grounds, forage fields, farms, and pastures. Others have been indirect, through pyrotechnologies that expanded humanity's reach beyond flame's grasp. Still, preindustrial and Indigenous societies largely operated within broad ecological constraints that determined how, and when, living landscapes could be burned. These ancient relationships between humans and fire broke down when people began to burn fossil biomass—lithic landscapes—and humanity's firepower became unbounded. Fire-catalyzed climate change globalized the impacts into a new geologic epoch. The Pleistocene yielded to the Pyrocene. Around fires, across millennia, we have told stories that explained the world and negotiated our place within it. The Pyrocene continues that tradition, describing how we have remade the Earth and how we might recover our responsibilities as keepers of the planetary flame.

Harold Biswell's decades of research and field experience were a major factor in developing policies of controlled or prescribed burning, which mimics or reintroduces the natural fire cycle. This comprehensive study introduces the principles and practices of prescribed burning, which apply far beyond California, within a historical and ecological perspective. Available for the first time in paperback, with a new foreword by James Agee, this book places Biswell's study—and his legacy—in the context of recent developments in the field.

This textbook provides students and academics with a conceptual understanding of fire behavior and fire effects on people and ecosystems to support effective integrated fire management. Through case studies, interactive spreadsheets programmed with equations and graphics, and clear explanations, the book provides undergraduate, graduate, and professional readers with a straightforward learning path. The authors draw from years of experience in successfully teaching fundamental concepts and applications, synthesizing cutting-edge science, and applying lessons learned from fire practitioners. We discuss fire as part of environmental and human health. Our process-based, comprehensive, and quantitative approach encompasses combustion and heat transfer, and fire effects on people, plants, soils, and animals in forest, grassland, and woodland ecosystems from around the Earth. Case studies and examples link fundamental concepts to local, landscape, and global fire implications, including social-ecological systems. Globally, fire science and integrated fire management have made major strides in the last few decades. Society faces numerous fire-related challenges, including the increasing occurrence of large fires that threaten people and property, smoke that poses a health hazard, and lengthening fire seasons worldwide. Fires are useful to suppress fires, conserve wildlife and habitat, enhance livestock grazing, manage fuels, and in ecological restoration. Understanding fire science is critical to forecasting the implication of global change for fires and their effects. Increasing the positive effects of fire (fuels reduction, enhanced habitat for many plants and animals, ecosystem services increased) while reducing the negative impacts of fires (loss of human lives, smoke and carbon emissions that threaten health, etc.) is part of making fires good servants rather than bad masters.

Leading researchers give an overview of the field of fire ecology in Australia.

Wildland fires have an irreplaceable role in sustaining many of our forests, shrublands and grasslands. They can be used as controlled burns or occur as free-burning wildfires, and can sometimes be dangerous and destructive to fauna, human communities and natural resources. Through scientific understanding of their behaviour, we can develop the tools to reliably use and manage fires across landscapes in ways that are compatible with the constraints of modern society while benefiting the ecosystems. The science of wildland fire is incomplete, however. Even the simplest fire behaviours – how fast they spread, how long they burn and how large they get – arise from a dynamical system of physical processes interacting in unexplored ways with heterogeneous biological, ecological and meteorological factors across many scales of time and space. The physics of heat transfer, combustion and ignition, for example, operate in all fires at millimetre and millisecond scales but wildfires can become conflagrations that burn for months and exceed millions of hectares. Wildland Fire Behaviour: Dynamics, Principles and Processes examines what is known and unknown about wildfire behaviours. The authors introduce fire as a dynamical system along with traditional steady-state concepts. They then break down the system into its primary physical components, describe how they depend upon environmental factors, and explore system dynamics by constructing and exercising a nonlinear model. The limits of modelling and knowledge are discussed throughout but emphasised by review of large fire behaviours. Advancing knowledge of fire behaviours will require a multidisciplinary approach and rely on quality measurements from experimental research, as covered in the final chapters.