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Warming weakens the night-time barrier to global fire

Year of Publication
2022
Publication Type

Night-time provides a critical window for slowing or extinguishing fires owing to the lower temperature and the lower vapour pressure deficit (VPD). However, fire danger is most often assessed based on daytime conditions1,2, capturing what promotes fire spread rather than what impedes fire.

Exposures and behavioural responses to wildfire smoke

Year of Publication
2022
Publication Type

Pollution from wildfires constitutes a growing source of poor air quality globally. To protect health, governments largely rely on citizens to limit their own wildfire smoke exposures, but the effectiveness of this strategy is hard to observe.

Pyrogenic carbon decomposition critical to resolving fire’s role in the Earth system

Year of Publication
2022
Publication Type

Recently identified post-fire carbon fluxes indicate that, to understand whether global fires represent a net carbon source or sink, one must consider both terrestrial carbon retention through pyrogenic carbon production and carbon losses via multiple pathways. Here these legacy source and sink pathways are quantified using a CMIP6 land surface model to estimate Earth’s fire carbon budget.

A collaborative agenda for archaeology and fire science

Year of Publication
2022
Publication Type

Humans have influenced global fire activity for millennia and will continue to do so into the future. Given the long-term interaction between humans and fire, we propose a collaborative research agenda linking archaeology and fire science that emphasizes the socioecological histories and consequences of anthropogenic fire in the development of fire management strategies today.

Rapid Growth of Large Forest Fires Drives the Exponential Response of Annual Forest-Fire Area to Aridity in the Western United States

Year of Publication
2022
Publication Type

Annual forest area burned (AFAB) in the western United States (US) has increased as a positive exponential function of rising aridity in recent decades. This non-linear response has important implications for AFAB in a changing climate, yet the cause of the exponential AFAB-aridity relationship has not been given rigorous attention.

Wildfire smoke cools summer river and stream water temperatures

Year of Publication
2018
Publication Type

To test the hypothesis that wildfire smoke can cool summer river and stream water temperatures by attenuating solar radiation and air temperature, we analyzed data on summer wildfire smoke, solar radiation, air temperatures, precipitation, river discharge, and water temperatures in the lower Klamath River Basin in Northern California.