PATTERNS OF WILDFIRE RISK IN THE UNITED STATES FROM SYSTEMATIC OPERATIONAL RISK ASSESSMENTS – HOW RISK IS CHARACTERIZED BY LAND MANAGERS

Since the turn of the 21st century, the complexity and costs of wildfires have increased substantially. There is a need to evaluate entrenched fire management practices that encourage status quo decision making to suppress fires. Data stored in mandated reporting systems collected during wildfires may provide a perspective on fire management decision-making needed to change wildfire governance structures. The Relative Risk Assessment (RRA) resides within a federally mandated workflow process necessary for all longer duration federal wildfires since 2010. Land managers rate hazard, probability and values at risk as high, moderate or low throughout the course of an incident to define wildfire risk as a precursor to strategy. 5,087 published risk assessments were evaluated to provide a snapshot of the how land managers characterize risk from every geographic area (GA) in the United States. Results suggest that most GAs have a tendency to select moderate relative risk; however, two unique regions warranted greater inspection. The Northwest utilizes high risk more than any other geographic area; and the Southwest opts for low risk. Following a mixed method explanatory research design, these GAs became the basis for exploring factors influencing high and low risk by coding qualitative text belonging to the RRA. Investigation of a 20% sample of wildfires from these regions provided finer specificity of the values at risk, hazard, and probability concerns emerging during wildfires. Results suggest that climate plays a pivotal role to lessen the impact of the fire environment in the Southwest and generally increases the severity of the fire environment in the Northwest. When risk is low, land managers exercised greater decision space by using a variety of strategies. High risk constrains decision space and managers opt for suppression strategies. Subsequently, the Southwest is poised to benefit from favorable climate to use more fire and there is mounting evidence that a patchwork of historical wild and prescribed fires are leading to greater decision space for the management of current wildfires by serving as barriers to fire spread. However, suppression strategies were the most common for both GAs suggesting challenges remain for the use of fire to achieve resource objectives

Effectiveness and longevity of fuel treatments in coniferous forests across California

Longevity of fuel treatment effectiveness to alter potential fire behavior is a critical question for managers preparing plans for fuel hazard reduction, prescribed burning, fire management, forest thinning, and other land management activities. Results from this study will help to reduce uncertainty associated with plan prioritization and maintenance activities. From 2001 to 2006, permanent plots were established in areas planned for hazardous fuel reduction treatments across 14 National Forests in California. Treatments included prescribed fire and mechanical methods (i.e., thinning of various sizes and intensities followed by a surface fuel treatment). After treatment, plots were re-measured at various intervals up to 10 years post-treatment. Very few empirically based studies exist with data beyond the first couple of years past treatment, and none span the breadth of California’s coniferous forests. With the data gathered, this research aimed to meet three main objectives: Objective 1) Determine the length of time that fuel treatments are effective at maintaining goals of reduced fire behavior, by a) measuring effects of treatments on canopy characteristics and surface fuel loads over time, and b) modeling potential fire behavior with custom fuel models. Objective 2) Quantify the uncertainty associated with the use of standard and custom fuel models. Objective 3) Assess prescribed fire effects on carbon stocks and validate modeled outputs. Results have shown initial reductions in surface fuels from prescribed fire treatments recover to pre-treatment levels by 10 yr post-treatment. Mechanical treatments continue to have variable effects on surface fuels. With the exception of mechanical treatments in red fir, both treatment types resulted in increased live understory vegetation by 8 yr post-treatment relative to pre-treatment. Mechanical treatment effects on stand structure remains fairly consistent through 8 yr post-treatment. Fire-induced delayed mortality contributes to slight decreases in canopy cover and canopy bulk density over time. For both treatment types, overall canopy base height decreases in later years due to in-growth of smaller trees, but it remains higher than pre-treatment. The changes in fuel loads and stand structure are reflected in fire behavior simulations via custom fuel modeling. Surface fire flame lengths were initially reduced as a result of prescribed fire, but by 10 yr post-treatment they exceeded the pre-treatment lengths. Though a low proportion of type of fire, initial reductions in potential crown fire returned to pre-treatment levels by 8 yr post-treatment; passive crown fire remained reduced relative to pre-treatment for the duration. Mechanical treatments showed variable and minimal effects on surface fire flame length over time; however the incidence of active crown fire was nearly halved from this treatment for the duration. The Fire and Fuels Extension to the Forest Vegetation Simulator (FFE-FVS) was used to model potential fire behavior for plots treated with prescribed fire to determine the differences in modeled fire behavior using standard and custom fuel models. In general predicted fire behavior from custom versus standard fuel models were similar with mean surface fire flame lengths slightly higher using standard fuel models for all time steps until the 8 yr post treatment. Similarly, custom fuel models predicted a higher instance of surface fire than standard fuel models with the exception of 8 yr post-treatment. To better understand the impact of prescribed fire on carbon stocks, we estimated aboveground and belowground (roots) carbon stocks using field measurements in FFE-FVS, and simulated wildfire emissions, before treatment and up to 8 yr post-prescribed fire. Prescribed fire treatments reduced total carbon by 13%, with the largest reduction in the forest floor (litter and duff) pool and the smallest the live tree pool. Combined carbon recovery and reduced wildfire emissions allowed the initial carbon source from wildfire and treatment to become a sink by 8 yr post-treatment relative to pre-treatment if both were to burn in a wildfire. In a comparison of field-derived versus FFE-FVS simulated carbon stocks, we found the total, tree, and belowground live carbon pools to be highly correlated. However, the variability within the other carbon pools compared was high (up to 212%)

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New insights from old bones: DNA preservation and degradation in permafrost preserved mammoth remains

Despite being plagued by heavily degraded DNA in palaeontological remains, most studies addressing the state of DNA degradation have been limited to types of damage which do not pose a hindrance to Taq polymerase during PCR. Application of serial qPCR to the two fractions obtained during extraction (demineralization and protein digest) from six permafrost mammoth bones and one partially degraded modern elephant bone has enabled further insight into the changes which endogenous DNA is subjected to during diagenesis. We show here that both fractions exhibit individual qualities in terms of the prevailing type of DNA (i.e. mitochondrial versus nuclear DNA) as well as the extent of damage, and in addition observed a highly variable ratio of mitochondrial to nuclear DNA among the six mammoth samples. While there is evidence suggesting that mitochondrial DNA is better preserved than nuclear DNA in ancient permafrost samples, we find the initial DNA concentration in the bone tissue to be as relevant for the total accessible mitochondrial DNA as the extent of DNA degradation post-mortem. We also evaluate the general applicability of indirect measures of preservation such as amino-acid racemization, bone crystallinity index and thermal age to these exceptionally well-preserved samples

Anti-tumor activity against multiple myeloma by combination of KW-2478, an Hsp90 inhibitor, with bortezomib

Heat shock protein 90 (Hsp90) is a promising target for anti-tumor therapy. We previously reported the anti-tumor activity of a novel Hsp90 inhibitor, KW-2478, in multiple myeloma (MM) as a single agent. In this study, we examined the combinational effect of KW-2478 and bortezomib, a proteasome inhibitor, in vitro and in vivo. In vitro, KW-2478 enhanced bortezomib-induced cell growth inhibition, both in MM cell lines and primary patient MM cells. The combination of KW-2478 and bortezomib also induced caspase activation in MM cell lines. Interestingly, the combination synergistically enhanced the expression of Hsp70B, a homolog of Hsp70, in human MM cells and peripheral blood mononuclear cells, indicating Hsp70B could be a surrogate biomarker for the combination of Hsp90 and proteasome inhibitors. In vivo, the combination of KW-2478 with bortezomib showed synergistic anti-tumor activity without significant body weight loss in a subcutaneously inoculated human myeloma model. Furthermore, the combination also showed synergistic reduction of tumor burden in bone marrow in an orthotopic myeloma model. Our results strongly suggest that combination of KW-2478 with bortezomib could exhibit enhanced anti-tumor activity against human myeloma

An XMM-Newton Observation of Abell 2597

We report on a 120 ks XMM-Newton observation of the galaxy cluster Abell 2597. Results from both the European Photon Imaging Camera (EPIC) and the Reflection Grating Spectrometer (RGS) are presented. From EPIC we obtain radial profiles of temperature, density and abundance, and use these to derive cooling time and entropy. We illustrate corrections to these profiles for projection and point spread function (PSF) effects. At the spatial resolution available to XMM-Newton, the temperature declines by around a factor of two in the central 150 kpc or so in radius, and the abundance increases from about one-fifth to over one-half solar. The cooling time is less than 10 Gyr inside a radius of 130 kpc. EPIC fits to the central region are consistent with a cooling flow of around 100 solar masses per year. Broad-band fits to the RGS spectra extracted from the central 2 arcmin are also consistent with a cooling flow of the same magnitude; with a preferred low-temperature cut-off of essentially zero. The data appear to suggest (albeit at low significance levels below formal detection limits) the presence of the important thermometer lines from Fe XVII at 15, 17 Angstrom rest wavelength, characteristic of gas at temperatures ~ 0.3 keV. The measured flux in each line is converted to a mass deposition estimate by comparison with a classical cooling flow model, and once again values at the level of 100 solar masses per year are obtained. These mass deposition rates, whilst lower than those of previous generations of X-ray observatories, are consistent with those obtained from UV data for this object. This raises the possibility of a classical cooling flow, at the level of around 100 solar masses per year, cooling from 4 keV by more than two orders of magnitude in temperature.Comment: 16 pages, 18 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRA

A Search for Dark Higgs Bosons

Recent astrophysical and terrestrial experiments have motivated the proposal of a dark sector with GeV-scale gauge boson force carriers and new Higgs bosons. We present a search for a dark Higgs boson using 516 fb-1 of data collected with the BABAR detector. We do not observe a significant signal and we set 90% confidence level upper limits on the product of the Standard Model-dark sector mixing angle and the dark sector coupling constant.Comment: 7 pages, 5 postscript figures, published version with improved plots for b/w printin

Measurement of the Forward-Backward Asymmetry in the B -> K(*) mu+ mu- Decay and First Observation of the Bs -> phi mu+ mu- Decay

We reconstruct the rare decays $B^+ \to K^+\mu^+\mu^-$, $B^0 \to K^{*}(892)^0\mu^+\mu^-$, and $B^0_s \to \phi(1020)\mu^+\mu^-$ in a data sample corresponding to $4.4 {\rm fb^{-1}}$ collected in $p\bar{p}$ collisions at $\sqrt{s}=1.96 {\rm TeV}$ by the CDF II detector at the Fermilab Tevatron Collider. Using $121 \pm 16$ $B^+ \to K^+\mu^+\mu^-$ and $101 \pm 12$ $B^0 \to K^{*0}\mu^+\mu^-$ decays we report the branching ratios. In addition, we report the measurement of the differential branching ratio and the muon forward-backward asymmetry in the $B^+$ and $B^0$ decay modes, and the $K^{*0}$ longitudinal polarization in the $B^0$ decay mode with respect to the squared dimuon mass. These are consistent with the theoretical prediction from the standard model, and most recent determinations from other experiments and of comparable accuracy. We also report the first observation of the $B^0_s \to \phi\mu^+\mu^- decay and measure its branching ratio${\mathcal{B}}(B^0_s \to \phi\mu^+\mu^-) = [1.44 \pm 0.33 \pm 0.46] \times 10^{-6}$using$27 \pm 6$signal events. This is currently the most rare$B^0_s$ decay observed.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, 3 tables. Submitted to Phys. Rev. Let

Search for a New Heavy Gauge Boson Wprime with Electron + missing ET Event Signature in ppbar collisions at sqrt(s)=1.96 TeV

We present a search for a new heavy charged vector boson $W^\prime$ decaying to an electron-neutrino pair in $p\bar{p}$ collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 1.96\unit{TeV}. The data were collected with the CDF II detector and correspond to an integrated luminosity of 5.3\unit{fb}^{-1}. No significant excess above the standard model expectation is observed and we set upper limits on $\sigma\cdot{\cal B}(W^\prime\to e\nu)$. Assuming standard model couplings to fermions and the neutrino from the $W^\prime$ boson decay to be light, we exclude a $W^\prime$ boson with mass less than 1.12\unit{TeV/}c^2 at the 95\unit{%} confidence level.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures Submitted to PR