Forest thinning and controlled burns take away fuel for fires, but the US can only treat so many acres. Which ones to choose?
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Articles on Firefighting
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Twenty-five years of research show what it takes to fuel wildland firefighters through an average day, and the toll the long seasonal work takes on their bodies.
In one finding, fire authorities chose to save a few farm sheds over 5,000 hectares of national park. Clearly, our fire management needs a reset.
With extreme weather events becoming more common, the fire and rescue service will need to change its approach.
Fire weather reason – when wildfires are most likely to strike – has expanded almost everywhere.
Dry, windy conditions have fueled destructive wildfires in Texas, Florida and other states in 2022. Understanding these terms can help people in fire-risk areas prepare.
Hurricane Michael left a jumbled mess of downed trees. Cleaning it up is even harder than it sounds, and now dead trees are burning.
Birds will shriek and dive at each other over food, territory or mates, but only a small number of species sport actual weapons. The reason: Flying matters more for their survival than fighting.
Indigenous fire management holds the key to a safer, more sustainable future on our flammable continent.
Australia’s bushfire response relies on foreign satellites, which are not designed to assess our highly flammable eucalypt-clad landscapes.
The US has learned that it cannot suppress its way to a healthy relationship with fire in the West. That strategy failed, even before climate change proved it to be no strategy at all.
A fire scientist explains the risk of flying embers that can travel over a mile from a wildfire and how people can protect their homes.
More than 40 fire scientists and forest ecologists in the US and Canada teamed up to investigate why wildfires are getting more extreme. Climate change is part of the problem, but there’s more.
Satellites can already spot a new fire within minutes, but the information they beam back to Earth isn’t getting to everyone who needs it or used as well as it could be.
Thousands of chemical compounds in wildfire smoke are interacting with each other and sunlight as the smoke travels. For people downwind, it can become more toxic over time.
Even if the proper infrastructure is implemented, it’s hard to say what course of action could possibly extinguish a fast-moving rural bushfire within an hour.
Relying on incarcerated workers in emergencies such as the wildfires ravaging parts of the US is a cheap alternative for states. But what protections are there for prisoners?
Wildfires blanketing several Western cities are creating hazardous health conditions. Don’t count on cloth masks to protect your lungs.
Wildfire smoke makes it harder for firefighters’ bodies to fight off viral invaders. But firefighting conditions make the usual protective measures nearly impossible.
I entered firefighter school at 23 and thought I was hard enough to withstand anything thrown at me. Fourteen years later, I can say firefighters are not indestructible.
Top contributors
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Director of the Southern Fire Exchange, University of Florida
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Assistant Professor of Environmental and Radiological Health Sciences, Colorado State University
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Professor, Australian National University
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PhD Student in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, UMass Amherst
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Fellow in Natural History, Australian National University
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Professor of exercise and work physiology, University of Montana
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Adjunct Lecturer, Computing and Security, Edith Cowan University
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Professor of Engineering, University of California, Merced
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Affiliate Assistant Professor, University of Washington
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NERC Independent Research Fellow in Climate Science, University of East Anglia
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Tenured Scientist (IMB-CSIC, Spain) & Honorary Associate Prof. (SU, UK), Swansea University
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Professor of Conservation Biology, Charles Darwin University
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Research Ecologist, United States Forest Service
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PhD Candidate, Edith Cowan University
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Postdoctoral research fellow, Australian National University
