Deforestation in the Amazon has dropped since the early 2000s, but it is slowly climbing again. A new study shows the impact of that climb on public health—and how much worse conditions could be.
wildfire
Posted inScience Updates
Wildfires Are Threatening Municipal Water Supplies
Climate change is driving an increase in catastrophic wildfires; consumers see, smell, and taste the effects in their water. Water utilities must prepare for worse times ahead.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Improved Algorithms Help Scientists Monitor Wildfires from Space
Wildfires release pollutants that harm human health. Quality satellite monitoring can help track these pollutants and predict where they may become health hazards.
Posted inNews
Amazon Forests Are Turning into Savannas
Floodplain forests have low resilience to repeated exposure to wildfires. As climate change increases the instances of fires, forests may transform to less productive grassland ecosystems.
Posted inNews
The Rain Forest Can Recover After Fire, but It’s Not the Same
New research finds that temperatures rise in the Amazon rain forest after a fire, even in areas that are not converted to agricultural land or pastures.
Posted inNews
Zooming In on Small Fires in Africa
By analyzing high-resolution satellite images, researchers found that fires burning in Africa were undercounted by as much as 80%.
Posted inFeatures
Fire as Medicine: Learning from Native American Fire Stewardship
For centuries, Indigenous peoples have worked to live in harmony with fire. Can integrating such cultural practices into contemporary wildfire management help prevent catastrophic wildfires?
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Mass Bird Die-Off Linked to Wildfires and Toxic Gases
Using observations from crowdsourced science and weather location data, researchers concluded that wildfires caused a mass die-off of birds in the western and central United States in 2020.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Widespread Wildfire as a Proxy for Resource Strain
Researchers have found a strong correlation between the number of days with widespread, synchronous fire danger and resource allocation across the western United States.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Uncovering Patterns in California’s Blazing Wildfires
A study of trends in wildfire occurrence over the past 30 years shows that environmental, climatic, and human-related factors can point out regions with high fire probabilities.