Wild and intentionally ignited fires are not new to North American landscapes or to the Indigenous cultures whose ancestral places encompass them. For millennia, Indigenous fire stewardship has been regionally and locally distributed across North American ecosystems.
Forest managers are faced with escalating size, severity, and cost of wildfires. To mitigate this, U.S. federal land management agencies are increasing forest treatments such as mechanical thinning and prescribed fire. While there is a growing body of work on treatment–wildfire interactions, treatment impacts in increasingly extreme wildfire situations remain unknown.
Growing wildfire risks are increasing losses and damages to wildland-urban interface households in the American West. In Colorado, the December 2021 Marshall Fire destroyed over 1000 suburban homes and became the most destructive fire in the state's history and the 10th costliest in US history.
Exposure to PM2·5 from wildfire smoke during pregnancy has been implicated as a risk factor for preterm birth. We investigated this association in the prospective nationwide US Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Cohort, focusing on prenatal wildfire PM2·5 exposure intensity, duration, and timing.
As the number and size of wildfires increase worldwide, so too has the realization that wildfires and hydrology are closely linked. The field of post-fire hydrology has been growing in recent decades, but the resultant datasets and studies are spread across disparate repositories and can be difficult for researchers and decision-makers to access.
Climate change in boreal regions is leading to warmer, drier conditions which amplify wildfire activity by altering fuel moisture, weather conditions, as well as the timing and duration of snow cover. Reduced snowpack and earlier snowmelt can lower fuel moisture, extend wildfire seasons, and increase burn severity.
Wildfire regimes are changing globally with an increase in global burned area and changes in fire characteristics. Recent research shows that the number of extreme fire events is increasing exponentially and events such as the most recent fires in Los Angeles in the U.S.