Simulating fuel management for protecting regional biodiversity under climate change.

Climate change is resulting in larger, more frequent, and more severe wildfires which have increasingly negative impacts on people and the environment. Under these circumstances, it is critical to determine whether fire management actions can mitigate biodiversity impacts under future fire regimes. However, it is currently unclear how changing climate and management interact to influence the spatial distribution of risks to biodiversity.

Fire management now and in the future: Will today's solutions still apply tomorrow?

Climate change and fire management actions are the two key drivers of fire regime changes now and into the future. The predicted effects of these drivers vary between regions and global climate projections; however, it is expected that fire regimes globally are likely to intensify. Increased wildfire extent, frequency and severity mean impacts to people, property, infrastructure, production and the environment are also likely to increase under worsening climate conditions.

Can green firebreaks help balance biodiversity, carbon storage and wildfire risk?

Green firebreaks (strategically placed plantings of low-flammability vegetation) are designed to reduce the rate of fire spread and thereby increase the suppressibility of fires. Successful examples have led to some fire-prone regions investing heavily in the establishment of green firebreaks as a method of reducing fire risk while improving biodiversity and carbon storage. However, beyond small-scale case studies there has been little research quantitatively exploring the interactions among biodiversity, carbon, and wildfire risk in relation to green firebreaks.

Costs of preventing and supressing wildfires in Victoria, Australia.

Land managers around the world are increasingly under pressure to demonstrate that the actions being used to moderate wildfire risk are effective and cost-efficient. However, little research to date has focused on determining cost-efficiency of management actions or identified the factors which increase the costs of performing such actions. Here, we aimed to identify the key drivers of cost for fuel management (prescribed burning, mulching, and slashing), fuel breaks, and suppression using data from the state of Victoria, Australia.

Fuel reduction burning reduces wildfire severity during extreme fire events in south-eastern Australia.

Extreme fire events have increased across south-eastern Australia owing to warmer and drier conditions driven by anthropogenic climate change. Fuel reduction burning is widely applied to reduce the occurrence and severity of wildfires; however, targeted assessment of the effectiveness of this practice is limited, especially under extreme climatic conditions. Our study utilises fire severity atlases for fuel reduction burns and wildfires to examine: (i) patterns in the extent of fuel treatment within planned burns (i.

The 2019-2020 Australian forest fires are a harbinger of decreased prescribed burning effectiveness under rising extreme conditions.

There is an imperative for fire agencies to quantify the potential for prescribed burning to mitigate risk to life, property and environmental values while facing changing climates. The 2019-2020 Black Summer fires in eastern Australia raised questions about the effectiveness of prescribed burning in mitigating risk under unprecedented fire conditions. We performed a simulation experiment to test the effects of different rates of prescribed burning treatment on risks posed by wildfire to life, property and infrastructure.

The fuel-climate-fire conundrum: How will fire regimes change in temperate eucalypt forests under climate change?

Fire regimes are changing across the globe in response to complex interactions between climate, fuel, and fire across space and time. Despite these complex interactions, research into predicting fire regime change is often unidimensional, typically focusing on direct relationships between fire activity and climate, increasing the chances of erroneous fire predictions that have ignored feedbacks with, for example, fuel loads and availability. Here, we quantify the direct and indirect role of climate on fire regime change in eucalypt dominated landscapes using a novel simulation approach that uses a landscape fire modelling framework to simulate fire regimes over decades to centuries.

Improved accuracy of wildfire simulations using fuel hazard estimates based on environmental data.

Wildfire extent and their impacts are increasing around the world. Fire management agencies use fire behaviour simulation models operationally (during a wildfire event) or strategically for risk assessment and treatment. These models provide agencies with increased knowledge of fire potential to improve identification of the best strategies for reducing risk.

Fire and biodiversity in the Anthropocene.

Fire has been a source of global biodiversity for millions of years. However, interactions with anthropogenic drivers such as climate change, land use, and invasive species are changing the nature of fire activity and its impacts. We review how such changes are threatening species with extinction and transforming terrestrial ecosystems.

Bayesian decision network modeling for environmental risk management: A wildfire case study.

Environmental decision-making requires an understanding of complex interacting systems across scales of space and time. A range of statistical methods, evaluation frameworks and modeling approaches have been applied for conducting structured environmental decision-making under uncertainty. Bayesian Decision Networks (BDNs) are a useful construct for addressing uncertainties in environmental decision-making.

Balancing fire risk and human thermal comfort in fire-prone urban landscapes.

Vegetation in urban areas provides many essential ecosystem services. These services may be indirect, such as carbon sequestration and biological diversity, or direct, including microclimate regulation and cultural values. As the global population is becoming ever more urbanized these services will be increasingly vital to the quality of life in urban areas.

The influence of planting size and configuration on landscape fire risk.

Revegetating cleared land with native trees and shrubs is increasingly used as a means of addressing loss of biodiversity, degraded soil and water resources and sequestration of carbon. However, revegetation also brings a potential to alter fire risk due to changing fuel types across the landscape. Previous research has found that increasing the area of revegetation does not increase the risk of fire at a landscape scale, but it remains unclear whether the design of revegetation can be optimised to minimise risk.

Wildfire refugia in forests: Severe fire weather and drought mute the influence of topography and fuel age.

Wildfire refugia (unburnt patches within large wildfires) are important for the persistence of fire-sensitive species across forested landscapes globally. A key challenge is to identify the factors that determine the distribution of fire refugia across space and time. In particular, determining the relative influence of climatic and landscape factors is important in order to understand likely changes in the distribution of wildfire refugia under future climates.

Developing and testing models of the drivers of anthropogenic and lightning-caused wildfire ignitions in south-eastern Australia.

Considerable investments are made in managing fire risk to human assets, including a growing use of fire behaviour simulation tools to allocate expenditure. Understanding fire risk requires estimation of the likelihood of ignition, spread of the fire and impact on assets. The ability to estimate and predict risk requires both the development of ignition likelihood models and the evaluation of these models in novel environments.

A Large-Scale Examination of Veterans with Normal Pure-Tone Hearing Thresholds within the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Background: Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) audiologists have anecdotally reported examining numerous Veterans with normal pure-tone thresholds; however, the prevalence of these patients within the VA is unknown. The VA audiological data repository provides an ideal dataset to examine this group of Veterans. Knowing the prevalence of normal-hearing Veterans within the VA system is the first step to understanding the underlying referral patterns and clinical complaints of Veterans.

Pathways of change: Predicting the effects of fire on flammability.

Impacts of wildfire on humans are increasing as urban populations continue to expand into fire prone landscapes. Effective fire risk management can only be achieved if we understand and quantify how ecosystems change in response to fire and how these changes affect flammability. However, there have been limited studies to this effect with the dominant paradigm being the assumption that recently burnt vegetation is less flammable than older vegetation.

Hearing Screening in the Community.

Background: Adults typically wait 7-10 yr after noticing hearing problems before seeking help, possibly because they are unaware of the extent of their impairment. Hearing screenings, frequently conducted at health fairs, community events, and retirement centers can increase this awareness. To our knowledge, there are no published studies in which testing conditions and outcomes have been examined for multiple "typical screening events.

Aboveground forest carbon shows different responses to fire frequency in harvested and unharvested forests.

Sequestration of carbon in forest ecosystems has been identified as an effective strategy to help mitigate the effects of global climate change. Prescribed burning and timber harvesting are two common, co-occurring, forest management practices that may alter forest carbon pools. Prescribed burning for forest management, such as wildfire risk reduction, may shorten inter-fire intervals and potentially reduce carbon stocks.

Suppression resource decisions are the dominant influence on containment of Australian forest and grass fires.

Fire agencies aim to contain wildfires before they impact on life, property and infrastructure and to reduce the risk of damage to the environment. Despite the large cost of suppression, there are few data on the success of suppression efforts under varying weather, fuel and resource scenarios. We examined over 2200 forest and 4600 grass fires in New South Wales, Australia to determine the dominant influences on the containment of wildfires.

Some Wildfire Ignition Causes Pose More Risk of Destroying Houses than Others.

Many houses are at risk of being destroyed by wildfires. While previous studies have improved our understanding of how, when and why houses are destroyed by wildfires, little attention has been given to how these fires started. We compiled a dataset of wildfires that destroyed houses in New South Wales and Victoria and, by comparing against wildfires where no houses were destroyed, investigated the relationship between the distribution of ignition causes for wildfires that did and did not destroy houses.

Biophysical Mechanistic Modelling Quantifies the Effects of Plant Traits on Fire Severity: Species, Not Surface Fuel Loads, Determine Flame Dimensions in Eucalypt Forests.

The influence of plant traits on forest fire behaviour has evolutionary, ecological and management implications, but is poorly understood and frequently discounted. We use a process model to quantify that influence and provide validation in a diverse range of eucalypt forests burnt under varying conditions. Measured height of consumption was compared to heights predicted using a surface fuel fire behaviour model, then key aspects of our model were sequentially added to this with and without species-specific information.

The drivers of wildfire enlargement do not exhibit scale thresholds in southeastern Australian forests.

Wildfires are complex adaptive systems, and have been hypothesized to exhibit scale-dependent transitions in the drivers of fire spread. Among other things, this makes the prediction of final fire size from conditions at the ignition difficult. We test this hypothesis by conducting a multi-scale statistical modelling of the factors determining whether fires reached 10 ha, then 100 ha then 1000 ha and the final size of fires >1000 ha.

Phoneme and Word Scoring in Speech-in-Noise Audiometry.

Purpose: Understanding speech in background noise is difficult for many individuals; however, time constraints have limited its inclusion in the clinical audiology assessment battery. Phoneme scoring of words has been suggested as a method of reducing test time and variability. The purposes of this study were to establish a phoneme scoring rubric and use it in testing phoneme and word perception in noise in older individuals and individuals with hearing impairment.

Electrophysiology and Perception of Speech in Noise in Older Listeners: Effects of Hearing Impairment and Age.

Objectives: Speech perception in background noise is difficult for many individuals, and there is considerable performance variability across listeners. The combination of physiological and behavioral measures may help to understand sources of this variability for individuals and groups and prove useful clinically with hard-to-test populations. The purpose of this study was threefold: (1) determine the effect of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and signal level on cortical auditory evoked potentials (CAEPs) and sentence-level perception in older normal-hearing (ONH) and older hearing-impaired (OHI) individuals, (2) determine the effects of hearing impairment and age on CAEPs and perception, and (3) explore how well CAEPs correlate with and predict speech perception in noise.