Living with fire

Natural History, April, 2005 by Robert Anderson

Those of us living in the hills around Los Angeles don't need to follow the news from Australia [see "Fire Down Under," by Dan Drollette, page 44] to understand what it's like to live with wildfire. Often enough, cool ash from the incinerated chaparral rains down on us, a tangible reminder that every forested hillside that doesn't burn this year is just fuel for the fires in the next.

A search of the Internet turned up a number of sites that deal with the dilemma: how to reconcile increasing development of the landscape with the natural forces of fire. My first stop was a Web page published by the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina (www.nhc.rtp.nc.us). Click on "Teacher Serve" in the menu at the left, select "Nature Transformed: The Environment in American History," and under "The Use of the Land," click on "History with Fire in Its Eye." The essay on this page, by Stephen J. Pyne of Arizona State University in Tempe, provides a good overview of the problem.

To the right of the title to Pyne's essay, you can click on "Links to Online Resources" for more detail about the human interaction with fire. Following one of the links took me to the home page of the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) (www.nifc.gov/). Here, you can check out the predictions for fire hazards in your area by downloading a map from the NIFC: select "Current Fire Information" from the menu on the home page, scroll down to "Weather, Outlooks and Assessments," and click on "National Monthly Outlook Map."

Thanks to the Terra and Aqua satellites orbiting Earth, and the publishing capabilities of the Internet, wildfires can be tracked as readily as hurricanes.

At the site of the U.S. Forest Service's "MODIS Active Fire Mapping Program" (activefiremaps.fs.fed.us), you can view a map that displays daily wildfire sightings in the continental U.S. (on the menu bar under the title, click "Fire Detections"). You can also discover where fires are burning in your region on a given day: on the menu bar, click "Regional Maps"; when a colored map appears, click on your geographical area, then select the kind of image you want to view from the choices at the right.

Good, up-to-date information on wildfires in Australia, including archived videos, can be found at the Web site of the Australian TV news program National Nine News (news.ninemsn.com.au/firewatch).

For a more thorough global perspective on wildfires, go to the Web site of NASA's Earth Observatory (earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Library/GlobalFire). This site makes it clear that extensive and long-burning fires can actually affect climate by pumping greenhouse gases and aerosols such as smoke particles into the atmosphere. After huge fires in Indonesia ignited the peat-covered forest floors there in 1997, atmospheric scientists recorded the largest annual jump in atmospheric carbon dioxide since C[O.sub.2] concentrations were first measured in 1957 (see the science bulletin on this subject, published by the American Museum of Natural History, at sciencebull etins.amnh.org/biobulletin/biobulletin/story581.html).

The vast boreal forest that girds the northern latitudes has emerged recently as a new area for investigators studying climate change [see "Northern Exposure," by J. David Henry, February 2005]. Information at the Woods Hole Research Center (www.whrc.org/borealnamerica/role_of_fire.htm) explains why more frequent and intense fires in the north could have powerful effects on climate worldwide.

ROBERT ANDERSON is a freelance science writer living in Los Angeles.