Forest fire smoke

Human exposure to known carcinogen 1,3-butadiene (BD) is common due to its high concentrations in automobile exhaust, cigarette smoke, and forest fires, as well as its widespread use in the polymer industry. The adverse health effects of BD are mediated by epoxide metabolites such as 3,4-epoxy-1-butene (EB), which reacts with DNA to form 1-hydroxyl-3-buten-1-yl adducts on DNA nucleobases. EB-derived mercapturic acids (1- and 2-( N -acetyl-l-cysteine- S -yl)-1-hydroxybut-3-ene (MHBMA) and N -acetyl- S -(3,4-dihydroxybutyl)-l-cysteine (DHBMA)) and urinary N7-(1-hydroxyl-3-buten-1-yl) guanine DNA adducts (EB-GII) have been used as biomarkers of BD exposure and cancer risk in smokers and occupationally exposed workers...

Tropical peatlands are the sites of Earth's largest fire events, with outsized contributions to greenhouse gases, toxic smoke, and haze rich with particulate matter. The human health risks from wildfire smoke are well known, but its effects on wildlife inhabiting these ecosystems are poorly understood. In 2015, peatland fires on Borneo created a thick haze of smoke that blanketed the region. We studied its effects on the long call vocalizations of four adult male Bornean orangutans ( Pongo pygmaeus wurmbii ) in a peat swamp forest...

Firefighters face numerous challenges when entering burning structures to rescue trapped victims, assess the conditions of a residential structure, and extinguish the fire as quickly as possible. These challenges include extreme temperatures, smoke, toxic gases, explosions, and falling objects, which can hinder their efficiency and pose risks to their safety. Accurate information and data about the burning site can help firefighters make informed decisions about their duties and determine when it is safe to enter and evacuate, reducing the likelihood of casualties...

Wildfire poses a significant threat and is considered a severe natural disaster, which endangers forest resources, wildlife, and human livelihoods. In recent times, there has been an increase in the number of wildfire incidents, and both human involvement with nature and the impacts of global warming play major roles in this. The rapid identification of fire starting from early smoke can be crucial in combating this issue, as it allows firefighters to respond quickly to the fire and prevent it from spreading...

The establishment of sustainable, low-intensity fire regimes is a pressing global challenge given escalating risk of wildfire driven by climate change. Globally, colonialism and industrialisation have disrupted traditional fire management, such as Indigenous patch burning and silvo-pastoral practices, leading to substantial build-up of fuel and increased fire risk. The disruption of fire regimes in southeastern Tasmania has led to dense even-aged regrowth in wet forests that are prone to crown fires, and dense Allocasuarina-dominated understoreys in dry forests that burn at high intensities...

People are constantly exposed to particulate matter and chemicals released during fires. However, there are still few studies on gas and particulate emissions related to exposure to burning firewood and charcoal during forest fires, making it difficult to understand the effects on the health of the population. The objective of this study was to quantify the metal(loid)s present in the smoke from wood and charcoal fires through the deposition of metals in beef topside and pork loin, considering the routes of skin exposure, inhalation, and ingestion, contributing to the understanding of metals in the increase of the risks of cancer and mortality associated with firefighting and children...

Drone monitoring plays an irreplaceable and significant role in forest firefighting due to its characteristics of wide-range observation and real-time messaging. However, aerial images are often susceptible to different degradation problems before performing high-level visual tasks including but not limited to smoke detection, fire classification, and regional localization. Recently, the majority of image enhancement methods are centered around particular types of degradation, necessitating the memory unit to accommodate different models for distinct scenarios in practical applications...

High concentrations of harmful gases released from forest fire will pose a short-term hazard to fire-fighters' cardiopulmonary function, even threaten their lives. In this study, laboratory experiments were conducted to examine the relationship between harmful gases concentrations and burning environment and fuel characteristics. In the experiments, fuel beds were created with controlled moisture contents and fuel loads; a wind tunnel device was used to conduct 144 trials, each with a specific wind speed. The easily predicted fire behavioral characteristics and the harmful gases concentrations such as CO, CO2 , NOx, SO2 which were released during fuel combustion were measured and analyzed...

Climate, deforestation, and forest fires are closely coupled in the Amazon, but models of fire that include these interactions are lacking. We trained machine learning models on temperature, rainfall, deforestation, land-use, and fire data to show that spatial and temporal patterns of fire in the Amazon are strongly modified by deforestation. We find that fire count across the Brazilian Amazon increases by 0.44 percentage points for each percentage point increase in deforestation rate. We used the model to predict that the increased deforestation rate in the Brazilian Amazon from 2013 to 2020 caused a 42% increase in fire counts in 2020...

Wildland firefighters (WLFFs) are inserted as the front-line defense to minimize loss of natural resources, property, and human life when fires erupt in forested regions of the world. The WLFF occupation is physically demanding as exemplified by total daily energy expenditures that can exceed 25 MJ/day (6000 calories). WLFFs must also cope with complex physical and environmental situations (i.e., heat, altitude, smoke, compromised sleep, elevated stress) which challenge thermoregulatory responses, impair recovery, and increase short- and long-term injury/health risks while presenting logistical obstacles to nutrient and fluid replenishment...

Wildland fires are a major source of gases and aerosols, and the production, dispersion, and transformation of fire emissions have significant ambient air quality impacts and climate interactions. The increase in wildfire area burned and severity across the United States and Canada in recent decades has led to increased interest in expanding the use of prescribed fires as a forest management tool. While the primary goal of prescribed fire use is to limit the loss of life and property and ecosystem damage by constraining the growth and severity of future wildfires, a potential additional benefit of prescribed fire - reduction in the adverse impacts of smoke production and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions - has recently gained the interest of land management agencies and policy makers in the United States and other nations...

Wildfires are increasing yearly in number and severity as a part of the evolving climate crisis. These fires are a significant source of air pollution, a common driver of flares in cardiorespiratory disease, including asthma, which is the most common chronic disease of childhood. Poorly controlled asthma leads to significant societal costs through morbidity, mortality, lost school and work time and healthcare utilization. This retrospective cohort study set in Calgary, Canada evaluates the relationship between asthma exacerbations during wildfire smoke events and equivalent low-pollution periods in a pediatric asthma population...

High CO concentration and dense aerosol layers at 1-6 km altitude in the free troposphere were observed over Rikubetsu, Japan, in ground-based Fourier transform spectrometer (FTS) and lidar measurements during 18-20 May 2016, days after intense wildfires east of Lake Baikal, Siberia. The column-averaged dry-air mole fraction of CO (XCO) was observed to be ∼150 ppb from 11:15 to 13:50 JST on 19 May, and peak aerosol optical depths (AODs) of 1.41 and 1.28 were observed at 15:40 JST 18 May and 11:20 JST 19 May, respectively...

Wildfire is one of the most significant dangers and the most serious natural catastrophe, endangering forest resources, animal life, and the human economy. Recent years have witnessed a rise in wildfire incidents. The two main factors are persistent human interference with the natural environment and global warming. Early detection of fire ignition from initial smoke can help firefighters react to such blazes before they become difficult to handle. Previous deep-learning approaches for wildfire smoke detection have been hampered by small or untrustworthy datasets, making it challenging to extrapolate the performances to real-world scenarios...

The semi-transparency property of smoke integrates it highly with the background contextual information in the image, which results in great visual differences in different areas. In addition, the limited annotation of smoke images from real forest scenarios brings more challenges for model training. In this paper, we design a semi-supervised learning strategy, named smoke-aware consistency (SAC), to maintain pixel and context perceptual consistency in different backgrounds. Furthermore, we propose a smoke detection strategy with triple classification assistance for smoke and smoke-like object discrimination...

Levels of fire activity and severity that are unprecedented in the instrumental record have recently been observed in forested regions around the world. Using a large sample of daily fire events and hourly climate data, here we show that fire activity in all global forest biomes responds strongly and predictably to exceedance of thresholds in atmospheric water demand, as measured by maximum daily vapour pressure deficit. The climatology of vapour pressure deficit can therefore be reliably used to predict forest fire risk under projected future climates...

To date, most existing forest fire smoke detection methods rely on coarse-grained identification, which only distinguishes between smoke and non-smoke. Thus, non-fire smoke and fire smoke are treated the same in these methods, resulting in false alarms within the smoke classes. The fine-grained identification of smoke which can identify differences between non-fire and fire smoke is of great significance for accurate forest fire monitoring; however, it requires a large database. In this paper, for the first time, we combine fine-grained smoke recognition with the few-shot technique using metric learning to identify fire smoke with the limited available database...

Northern peatlands are globally important carbon stores, but with increasing fire frequency, the re-establishment of bryophytes (notably Sphagnum) becomes crucial for their carbon sequestration. Smoke-responsive germination is a common trait in seeds in fire-prone ecosystems but has not been demonstrated in bryophyte spores. To investigate the potential role of smoke in post-fire peatland recovery, we tested the germination of spores of fifteen bryophyte species after treatment with smoke-water. Comparison of smoke responsiveness between spores of different laboratory storage times and burial depths/age (3-200 yrs old) were subsequently tested...

Major source of carbon-contacting air born particular matter that significantly pollutes environment and provokes development of neuropathology is forest fires and wood combustion. Here, water-suspended smoke particulate matter preparations (SPs) were synthesized from birch, pine, poplar wood, and also birch bark and pine needles. Taking into account importance of the gut-brain communication system, SP properties were compared regarding their capability to modulate functioning of nerve terminals and gut cells/preparations...

Smoke is an early visual phenomenon of forest fires, and the timely detection of smoke is of great significance for early warning systems. However, most existing smoke detection algorithms have varying levels of accuracy over different distances. This paper proposes a new smoke root detection algorithm that integrates the static and dynamic features of smoke and detects the final smoke root based on clustering and the circumcircle. Compared with the existing methods, the newly developed method has a higher accuracy and detection efficiency on the full scale, indicating that the method has a wider range of applications in the quicker detection of smoke in forests and the prevention of potential forest fire spread...