For 27 years, the Southwest has been gripped by a historic drought. Scientists think it might be here to stay.

Welcome to a poisonous trail of number two.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

Robert Ricklefs, a giant of ecology, passed away on Sunday. It is hard to overstate the extensive impact Bob had on the field. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in the US,…

Wildfires are among the most pressing environmental challenges of the 21st century, intensified by the accumulation of forest fuels after a century of fire suppression policies. Although fuel-reductio...

With rising temperatures, longer summers, drought, and more wildfires occurring in the United States and Canada, there is growing interest in the impact and efficacy of Indigenous fire and cultural bu...

Climate change, expanding human ignitions, and increased fuels from fire exclusion are driving increases in area burned and fire severity in dry conifer forests of the western United States. Increasi...

The Trump administration is breaking up the National Center for Atmospheric Research, taking aim at one of the world's leading climate research labs.

Tree-ring density measurement resolution affects low-frequency trends in temperature reconstructions High-resolution anatomical maximum latewood density has stronger correlations with instrumenta...

There’s remarkable synchronicity between the timing of a paleolake in what is today Grand Canyon National Park and the formation of nearby Barringer Meteorite Crater.

Mike Wallace says reality is bad enough. Catastrophe-versus-hoax framing obscures the momentous dangers from unabated greenhouse-gas heating.

Background The increasing size, severity, and frequency of wildfires is one of the most rapid ways climate warming could alter the structure and function of high-latitude ecosystems. Historically, boreal forests in western North America had fire return intervals (FRI) of 70–130 years, but shortened FRIs are becoming increasingly common under extreme weather conditions. Here, we quantified pre-fire and post-fire C pools and C losses and assessed post-fire seedling regeneration in long (> 70 years), intermediate (30–70 years), and short (< 30 years) FRIs, and triple (three fires in < 70 years) burns. As boreal forests store a significant portion of the global terrestrial carbon (C) pool, understanding the impacts of shortened FRIs on these ecosystems is critical for predicting the global C balance and feedbacks to climate. Results Using a spatially extensive dataset of 555 plots from 31 separate fires in Interior Alaska, our study demonstrates that shortened FRIs decrease the C storage capacity of boreal forests through loss of legacy C and regeneration failure. Total wildfire C emissions were similar among FRI classes, ranging from 2.5 to 3.5 kg C m−2. However, shortened FRIs lost proportionally more of their pre-fire C pools, resulting in substantially lower post-fire C pools than long FRIs. Shortened FRIs also resulted in the combustion of legacy C, defined as C that escaped combustion in one or more previous fires. We found that post-fire successional trajectories were impacted by FRI, with ~ 65% of short FRIs and triple burns experiencing regeneration failure. Conclusions Our study highlights the structural and functional vulnerability of boreal forests to increasing fire frequency. Shortened FRIs and the combustion of legacy C can shift boreal ecosystems from a net C sink or neutral to a net C source to the atmosphere and increase the risk of transitions to non-forested states. These changes could have profound implications for the boreal C-climate feedback and underscore the need for adaptive management strategies that prioritize the structural and functional resilience of boreal forest ecosystems to expected increases in fire frequency.

Climate change and land mismanagement are creating increasingly fire-prone built and natural environments. However, despite worsening fire seasons, evidence is lacking globally for trends in socially ...

Things have changed since 2009: We’re more certain about the problems.

Wildfires are causing earlier snowmelt across the western US, and this effect would be exacerbated with projected warmer winters.

Militant, nationalistic, white supremacist violent extremism has increased in the United States. In fact, the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic...

Justice William O. Douglas, in his dissenting opinion of the Supreme Court’s decision in Sierra Club v. Morton, said “Contemporary public concern for protecting nature’s ecological equilibrium...

After 117 years of operation, the U.S. Forest Service’s Southwest Regional Office in Albuquerque is closing by order of the secretary of agriculture. Since 1908, this office has directed the