Customer Reviews

Forest Fires: Behavior and Ecological Effects

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This is a book for someone who is SERIOUS about learning about wildfires. It is full of complex math formulas and many things that are beyond most readers. Read only if interested in highly technical data.

The book is aimed to bridge a gap between researcher and applied management. The covers a wide range of topics from fire combustion, to fuel moisture dynamics, the interaction between fire and its surrounding atmosphere, lightning ignition, fire effects and fire management. The chapters for each of these adequately deal with the topic, sometimes at a level which will beyond most people's ken. The book is missing a level of integration within and between chapters, which makes it difficult to appreciate the book's comprehensive nature. It would have been nice to have an overarching framework on fire behaviour and ecological effects to direct the writers of each chapter towards a central understanding of fires and their ecological effects. The book does cover fires and their effects in both northern and southern hemispheres. Some of the figures could have benefitted from being in colour.

I recently discovered that this book is supposed to have COLOR picture plates in the center to illustrate the fire effects. The book I received from Amazon has black and white pictures. They have given no indication that they are selling a modified version of the book. The black and white picture are reasonable quality but in no way show what was intended with the color ones. Amazon charges the same price as versions with the color plates.
DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK. Go somewhere where you can verify that the picture plates in the center are supposed to be color.