Cover -- FIRE IN THE FOREST -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Preface -- Contributors -- 1: In the beginning -- The nature of fire -- Just how widespread are forest fires? -- 2: Historical review -- The earliest beginnings of fire in geological time -- Tertiary and Quaternary - the last 65 million years -- Holocene - the last 10 000 years -- The intervention of humans -- Uses of fire -- Control of fire - careful or careless? -- Effect of aboriginal people on the landscape -- Arrival of the Europeans -- Bambi and Smokey Bear -- Reduced fire frequencies -- Fire control to fire management -- Are fire frequencies increasing again? -- 3: How a fire burns -- Mechanics of fire -- Pre-ignition -- Ignition -- Combustion -- Heat transfer -- Variation in fuel quality -- Moisture -- Chemical make-up -- Size and shape -- Temperature and energy -- Anatomy of a fire -- Types of fire -- Ground fire -- Surface fire -- Crown fire -- Dynamics of extreme fires -- Convection columns -- Spot fires -- Fire whirls, horizontal roll vortices and fire storms -- Scales of fire impact smoke -- 4: Fire in the wild landscape -- Causes of wildfire - how do they start? -- Lightning -- Volcanism -- Human fire starters -- Other sources -- What starts most fires? -- Which burns most area? -- The fire behaviour triangle -- Fuel considerations fires are what they consume -- Types of fuel -- Drying of fuel -- Fuel arrangement -- Amount of fuel -- Fuel load -- Available fuel -- Link between fuel and fire behaviour -- The effect of climate and weather -- Climate effects -- Weather effects -- Fire season -- Variability in how a fire spreads -- Chance -- Fuel quality and amount -- Topography -- The complexity of fire spread -- Patterns/mosaics on the landscape -- Patterns of fire over time -- What affects how often a piece of land reburns? -- Reconstructing fire history.

Fire size - how big is big? -- 5: Fire ecology -- How plants survive a surface fire -- Thick bark -- Resprouting -- Fire stimulation of flowering -- Ground fires and plant survival -- How plants cope with a crown fire -- Seed storage in the canopy serotiny -- Seed storage in the soil -- What makes buried seeds germinate at the right time? -- Sneaking past - invasion after a fire -- Combining these strategies -- Bacteria and fungi -- Animals and fire -- What kinds of animals are killed during a fire? -- What happens to animal numbers after a fire? -- Post-fire recovery of plants and animals -- 6: The benefits of fire and its use as a landscape tool -- Fire and biodiversity - an overview -- Unpicking the factors that affect biodiversity -- Fire frequency -- Intensity and severity -- Season -- Patchiness and animals - does size matter? -- Other factors -- Environmental legacies: dead wood and biodiversity -- Fire, forests and conservation -- Can clear-cutting replace fire? -- The future for fire-prone forests: environmental uncertainty, macroecology and ecosystem resilience -- Fire as a management tool in the landscape -- Fire and soils -- The wildland-urban interface (WUI) -- The role of prescribed burning in wildland-urban interface areas -- 7: Fire suppression -- Preliminary steps - fire intelligence -- Weather -- Fuels and topography -- Values -- Adding it all up - the fire intelligence function -- Step 1: fire detection -- Passive detection -- Organised detection -- Fixed detection -- Aerial detection -- Step 2: dispatch -- Resources for fire suppression -- Ground-based resources -- Aerial-based resources -- Step 3: suppression -- Step 4: suppression failure - large fire management -- Fatality fires -- The fire-management organisation -- Planning ahead -- Planning beyond the here-and-now.

8: Wildland fire and its management - a look towards the future -- The age of uncertainty -- Trends and supertrends -- Technological progress -- Population growth, distribution and demographics -- Globalisation -- Economics -- Climate change -- Adaptation -- Innovation -- Banff National Park, Canada: a systems-design approach to ecosystem and fire management -- State Farm Insurance - changing the odds -- Australia - respecting wildfire and taking responsibility -- The future - ours for the making -- Further reading -- References used in the text -- Index.