An analysis of 88 million wildfire observations over the past 21 years shows a strong increase in the frequency and intensity of the most extreme fires around the world.
There’s a strong case to be made for private landholders to conduct their own cool burns, for dual purposes of reducing fuel load and restoring the ecology.
Are wombats the accidental heroes of the Australian bush? After the Black Summer bushfires, we set up 56 cameras to capture animal activity in areas with and without wombat burrows to find out.
The 2023 megafires burnt more than 84 million hectares of desert and savannah in northern Australia. That’s larger than the whole of NSW, or more than three times size of the UK.
We compiled maps of bushfires and prescribed burns in southern Australia from 1980 to 2021 to see how fire activity is changing habitat for 129 threatened species such as mountain pygmy possums.
We think of laughing kookaburras as common in Australia and their call certainly lets us know when they’re about. But several factors are driving down their numbers.
Marsupial rescue, rehabilitation and release statistics from New South Wales and Kangaroo Island during Black Summer fires reveal poor survival rates, despite the courageous efforts of volunteers.
Buildings can be engineered to resist bushfires, but we can’t engineer the many aspects of human behaviour and decision-making that will still put lives at risk.
We used satellite data to create global maps of where and how fires are burning. Fire season lasts two weeks longer than it used to and fires are more intense. But there are regional differences.
Parents and emergency responders repeatedly said evacuation centres should have a separate space for families with very young children. Here’s what else we could do.
Until now, a limitation of records of past fires is that these have come from sediments laid down in lakes and bogs. Records for dryland regions have been lacking, but dune deposits can fill the gap.
Two decades of satellite data have allowed us to map fires across the country and identify areas facing high fire risks. Fire activity has increased in several major regions over the past decade.
The tiny golden-tipped bat roosts in the nests of rainforest birds. But high intensity extreme fires can increasingly reach into their unburnt sanctuaries.
The paltry spending means many species severely impacted by the megafires were left in desperate trouble, potentially pushing some closer to extinction.
The climate crisis demands innovations in our everyday infrastructures. If these changes are to be adopted en masse, finding the right fit between communities and infrastructures is vital.