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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Physical and Environmental Geography

Doctoral Dissertations

Fire

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Modeling Fire Observations, Ignition Sources, And Novel Fuels To Understand Human Impacts On Fire Regimes Across The U.S., Emily Fusco Jul 2019

Modeling Fire Observations, Ignition Sources, And Novel Fuels To Understand Human Impacts On Fire Regimes Across The U.S., Emily Fusco

Doctoral Dissertations

Fire is a natural, and necessary, component of many ecosystems. However, people are changing the spatial and temporal distribution of wildfires in the U.S. at great economic and ecological costs. My dissertation addresses the impacts of humans on U.S. fires both through the introduction of ignition sources and flammable grasses. Further, I evaluate fire datasets that are widely used to investigate these phenomena over large spatial and temporal scales. Finally, I create an aboveground carbon map that can be used to estimate the potential carbon loss consequences in western U.S. ecosystems most at risk to fire. My work shows that …


Reconstructing Late Holocene Fire, Agriculture, And Climate From Sediment Records In Costa Rica And The Dominican Republic, Erik Nicholas Johanson Dec 2016

Reconstructing Late Holocene Fire, Agriculture, And Climate From Sediment Records In Costa Rica And The Dominican Republic, Erik Nicholas Johanson

Doctoral Dissertations

We use multiple proxies from sediment cores to identify periods of climate stress during the late Holocene across the circum-Caribbean region and to determine how fire activity and signals of Pre-Columbian agriculture coincide with these arid periods. We examine evidence of aridity from stable carbon isotope ratios and shifts in elemental composition, along with pollen and microscopic charcoal, at Bao Bog in the highlands of Hispaniola. We infer two major periods of aridity (3600–2300 and 1040–850 cal yr BP), with the later period associated with the late phase of the Terminal Classic Drought. A third, less marked interval of aridity …


Using Spatial Analysis To Evaluate Fire Activity In A Pine Rockland Ecosystem, Big Pine Key, Florida, Usa, Lauren Ashley Stachowiak Aug 2016

Using Spatial Analysis To Evaluate Fire Activity In A Pine Rockland Ecosystem, Big Pine Key, Florida, Usa, Lauren Ashley Stachowiak

Doctoral Dissertations

Pine rocklands are fire-prone ecosystems with limited spatial extent, and have experienced reduced area in the previous decades through habitat conversion and urbanization. The purpose of this dissertation research was to evaluate the historical range of variability of fire activity and spatial patterns of fires in a pine rockland ecosystem in the National Key Deer Refuge (NKDR) on Big Pine Key in the Lower Florida Keys. To investigate the temporal and spatial patterns in fire activity, I (1) evaluated the temporal patterns for fires in my study area in the NKDR, (2) analyzed differences in standard fire history metrics since …