The oldest reports located date back to the 1960s, with the first reported carbon monoxide (CO) and carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions factors dating from the late 1960s. It was not until the early 1980s that significant amounts of emissions data for wildland fire were reported. In total, 230 references were located and evaluated. See the Final Report for RC-1649 for a complete listing of the documents that were located and included in the database. Emissions information for 118 smoke components from 51 of the reviewed references are currently contained in the Wildland Fire Emissions Factor Database, which contains information published up to 2011 (Lincoln et al. 2014). Pertinent information related to the fuels, instrumentation used, and geographic location is contained in the spreadsheet and can be used to locate emissions factors using the spreadsheet search functions. All 230 references were electronically scanned and are available in the data archive. If it was not possible to convert emission ratios and emission concentrations to emissions factors using information contained in the original source, the data were not included in the database. Inclusion or exclusion of data from a particular report is not a statement on the quality of the information.

Users of the database should draw their own conclusions regarding the applicability of the information to their particular situation. Additional emissions factors from RC-1647, RC-1648, and RC-1649 that were not included in the database because of time limitations include:

• recalculated laboratory emission factors normalized to field conditions (Yokelson et al. 2013) and
• particulate emissions information from the laboratory portion of these projects (Hosseini et al. 2013).

References

Hosseini, S; S.P Urbanski, P. Dixit, Q. Li, I.R. Burling, R.J. Yokelson, T.J. Johnson, M. Sharivastava, H. Jung, D.R. Weise, J.W. Miller, and D.M. Cocker III. 2013. Laboratory characterization of PM emissions from combustion of wildland biomass fuels. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres 118:9914‒9929.

Lincoln, E., W.M. Hao, D.R. Weise, and T.J. Johnson. 2014. Wildland fire emission factors database. USDA Forest Service Research Data Archive, Fort Collins, CO, doi: RDS-2014-0012.

Yokelson, R. J.; I.R. Burling, J.B. Gilman, C. Warneke, C.E. Stockwell, J. de Gouw, S.K. Akagi, S.P. Urbanski, P. Veres, J.M. Roberts, W.C. Kuster, J. Reardon, D.W.T. Griffith, T.J. Johnson, S. Hosseini, J.W. Miller, D.R. Cocker III, H. Jung, and D.R. Weise. 2013. Coupling field and laboratory measurements to estimate the emission factors of identified and unidentified trace gases for prescribed fires. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics 13:89‒116.