Across the American West, managers of fire-prone landscapes are increasingly using a practice that seems counterintuitive: setting small fires to prevent larger, more destructive ones. Commonly called "prescribed burns," ...
Environment
Jan 17, 2024
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50
Wildfires can transform a benign metal in soils and plants into toxic particles that easily become airborne, according to a new study from Stanford University.
Earth Sciences
Dec 12, 2023
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41
Prescribed fires, sometimes called controlled burns, are one of the most common tools for preventing catastrophic wildfires in the Western United States. Lit by highly trained firefighters, they help clear away excess dry ...
Earth Sciences
Oct 3, 2023
0
39
The increasing number of extreme bushfires around the world, as currently seen in Canada and Greece and previously during the Australian Black Summer, could exacerbate climate change and further disrupt Earth's systems, leading ...
Earth Sciences
Aug 14, 2023
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34
Though prescribed burns reduce wildfire threats and even improve habitat for some animals, new research shows these fires also spread stinknet, an aptly named weed currently invading superblooms across the Southwestern U.S.
Ecology
May 23, 2023
0
48
More than three times as many houses and other structures burned in Western wildfires in 2010–2020 than in the previous decade, and that wasn't only because more acreage burned, a new analysis has found. Human ignitions ...
Earth Sciences
Feb 1, 2023
0
85
Prescribed burning of ground-level shrubs, branches and leaves is a time-tested tool to help prevent wildland fires from getting out of control, but a team led by researchers at the University of California, Irvine suggests ...
Environment
May 17, 2022
1
93
Setting fire to forest and agricultural land in Southeast Asia to prepare it for cultivation or grazing contributes to an estimated 59,000 premature deaths a year, say scientists.
Earth Sciences
Sep 2, 2021
0
53
Even in the wettest parts of the Amazon, the impact of forest fires, which spread through these areas only during extreme droughts, is sufficient to change the characteristics of the vegetation in the coming decades, although ...
Ecology
Aug 17, 2021
0
246
For nearly half a century, lightning-sparked blazes in Yosemite's Illilouette Creek Basin have rippled across the landscape—closely monitored, but largely unchecked. Their flames might explode into plumes of heat that burn ...
Environment
Aug 9, 2021
7
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