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Crown Fire

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Encyclopedia of Wildfires and Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) Fires

Synonyms

Canopy fire

Definition

A crown fire is defined as a fire that has ascended from the ground into the forest canopy and is spreading through it, usually in conjunction with the surface fuels.

Introduction

Live vegetation and dead vegetative fuel in forests, woodlands, and shrublands is generally distributed in layers along a vertical vegetation profile from the surface of the ground to the top of the trees. The higher layer of this profile, the canopy layer, includes the crowns of tall trees and, in some cases, the crowns of tall shrubs.

When wildfires spread through a forest, they do not necessarily burn all fuel layers. As a rule, they start on dead fuels on the forest floor, and they are classified according to the tallest fuel layer that they burn as ground fires, surface fires, and crown fires. Depending on the conditions, the layers that burn may change during the evolution of a fire.

Crown fires are less common than surface fires in most forest ecosystems, but because of...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Mediterranean Forest Ecosystems, Hellenic Agricultural Organization “Demeter”, Athens, Greece

    Gavriil Xanthopoulos

  2. Wildfire Management Consulting and Training, Athens, Greece

    Miltiadis Athanasiou

Authors
  1. Gavriil Xanthopoulos
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  2. Miltiadis Athanasiou
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Correspondence to Gavriil Xanthopoulos .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. United States Department of Commerce, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD, USA

    Samuel L. Manzello

Section Editor information

  1. USDA Forest Service, RMRS Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory, Missoula, MT, USA

    Sara McAllister

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Xanthopoulos, G., Athanasiou, M. (2020). Crown Fire. In: Manzello, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of Wildfires and Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) Fires. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51727-8_13-1

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