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Do One Percent of the Forest Fires Cause Ninety-Nine Percent of the Damage?
Abstract
A relatively small number of forest fires are responsible for a very high proportion of the total damage. The proportion due to the fraction p of largest fires, when plotted against p, is a measure of variability of fire sizes that is especially sensitive to the important extreme events. We find the theoretical form of the plot for several commonly used distributions and show how the results can be used in the analysis of empirical plots from actual fire size distributions. Some simple graphical methods are suggested for the fitting of truncated Pareto and lognormal distributions to empirical data. We use the plots to compare the firesize heterogeneity of several fire climate regions of the western United States; the proportion of area burned by the 1% of largest fires ranges from 80%-96%. We also compare patterns of the larger fires for Southern California and Baja California. For. Sci 35(2):319-328.
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Cited by
Defining pyromes and global syndromes of fire regimes
Archibald, S., Lehmann, C. E. R., Gómez-Dans, J. L., & Bradstock, R. A. (2013) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.1211466110 · Cited by 845
A review of prescribed burning effectiveness in fire hazard reduction.
Fernandes, P. M., & Botelho, H. S. (2003) · International Journal of Wildland Fire · doi:10.1071/wf02042 · Cited by 718
Climate warming, wildfire hazard, and wildfire occurrence in coastal eastern Spain.
Piñol, J., Terradas, J., & Lloret, F. (1998) · Climatic Change · doi:10.1023/a:1005316632105 · Cited by 625
Climate change presents increased potential for very large fires in the contiguous United States
Barbero, R., Abatzoglou, J. T., Larkin, N. K., Kolden, C. A., & Stocks, B. (2015) · International Journal of Wildland Fire · doi:10.1071/wf15083 · Cited by 434
Johnson, E. A., & Gutsell, S. L. (1994) · Advances in Ecological Research · doi:10.1016/s0065-2504(08)60216-0 · Cited by 414
Metadata
- Authors
- Strauss, D., Bednar, L., & Mees, R.
- Venue
- Forest Science
- Published
- 1989-06-01
- Volume
- 35
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 319-328
- ISSN
- 0015-749X (ISSN-L)
- 1938-3738
- OpenAlex
- W2464779821
- Cited by
- 234
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 1.95
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- Strauss, D., Bednar, L., & Mees, R. (1989). Do One Percent of the Forest Fires Cause Ninety-Nine Percent of the Damage? Forest Science. https://doi.org/10.1093/forestscience/35.2.319
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