Featured Image

Fires in Zambia, Africa

Managing wildlfire is a difficult business but it is pretty much the same the world over. In order to prevent future fires you need to start small controlled fires to get rid of what wildfires can use as fuel in areas you really don't want burned. Recently personnel from the U.S. Forest Service have been teaching fire monitoring to personnel in Zambia’s Kafue National Park.

Kafue National Reserve is more than twice the size of Yellowstone. Fire plays a big role in maintaining a healthy ecosystem because you want to control the spread of fire across the region and contain it as best you can. This is done by purposely igniting fires just after the wet season, removing most of the fuel before the land really dries out. Early-season fires, when the ground is still wet, have few negative ecological effects; however the dry-season fires tend to burn intensely and uncontrollably. This pattern is significantly reducing shrub cover across Kafue, which provides essential wildlife habitat.

The information presented above was taken from a USDA blog dated August 30, 2012.

The fires seen in this image may well be intentionally set fires in order to burn out areas which may have fueled future wildfires.

This natural-color satellite image shows smoke streaming from fires across Zambia. It was collected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard the Aqua satellite on September 02, 2012. Actively burning areas, detected by MODIS’s thermal bands, are outlined in red.

NASA image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz LANCE/EOSDIS MODIS Rapid Response Team, GSFC. Caption by Lynn Jenner.