Future Fire reads the papers
November 2022 edition
Reading papers is an essential part of being a scientist. Put simply, it’s not possible to make sensible decisions about what and how to study if you’re not aware of what has come before. You can get quite far with conversations, conferences and other less formal formats, but really, there’s no substitute for reading journal articles.
The more you read, the better your sense of what we know, what we don’t and how confident we are about both. You find out about methods: the different ways people try to answer scientific questions. You find out about datasets: the different collections of observations or model outputs designed to shed light on the things we’re trying to understand. You get a (muted) sense of who’s who in the field. Active researchers, productive labs, rising stars, lone wolves. Sometimes you see a technique, idea or result make a splash and leave ripples in the field over months and years. Stick around long enough and you get a sense for the ebb and flow of questions worth asking, framings of phenomena and fields, entire paradigms of knowledge. You know, like, the vibe.
I hasten to add that being aware of ‘the literature’, as we snobbishly call it, does not compel one to blindly follow it. But it undoubtedly helps others to digest our research if we don’t stray too far from it and if we do, we should try to paint a clear picture of why. The question of what counts as new (or ‘novel’, again in the jargon) in science is an interesting and probably somewhat troubling one, that I’ll happily leave for another day.
The aforementioned notwithstanding, I’m not very good at reading papers. I am, however, excellent at collecting them. In the first of what I hope will be a regular series, come join me as I pull up a table on the balcony, pour myself a coffee and take a look at the latest research, divided into completely arbitrary categories.
Discordia
Not one paper, nor two, but three. No I’m not talking about a three parter, which I can’t recall ever having seen (I can remember several two-parters). I’m talking about the closest published science gets to a tabloid newspaper or trashy magazine, the Article-Letter-Reply trilogy. This is where someone publishes a study, then someone complains about how crap it was, then the authors unload both barrels on the complainant. I enjoy a a bit of scientific trash-talk, but it’s probably wise that these sorts of things end at the third article. The debate often gets taken up in a subsequent, related study anyway.
Such is the case here, with Bowman et al 21 and their provocatively titled “The severity and extent of the Australia 2019-20 Eucalyptus forest fires are not the legacy of forest management”, which appeared in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution in 2021. The paper investigated claims made in a previous study by Lindenmayer et al., which explains why Lindenmayer et al wrote a letter in response to it, to which Bowman et al duly replied with the final say (for now). I am hopelessly conflicted, having worked or published with basically everyone on Bowman’s paper (and one person on Lindenmayer’s letter) and generally prefer to view conflict from a safe distance anyway. I will thus refrain from commenting on the three papers and the various claims therein, other than to say that wading through them is illuminating, entertaining and worth your time.
I’m reminded of a certain former colleague who happily pointed out that having your paper attacked in a letter was at least a surefire path to an additional publication (in the form of the reply, to which authors are entitled). Publications are the coin of the academic realm, in case you didn’t know.
Grundrisse
Many of the following experimental offerings are from past and present colleagues of mine. There’s no flavour of guilt quite like the flavour of not having read your own colleagues’ work. It doesn’t help that they’re all so productive! These are all impressive field studies, providing the foundation for the modelling lazy people like myself get up to.
Burton et al 22, fine fuel in the face of timber harvesting and prescribed burning
Burton et al 19, fine fuel moisture dynamics from a few years ago. As an added bonus, who doesn’t love a paper with a pun or catchy title? Here we have “Shifting states, altered fates”.
Fairman et al 22, carbon stocks and stability after short interval fires
Pickering et al 22, important paper that takes a real bite out of the fuel response to mastication problem
Brown et al 22, live fuel moisture responding to soil moisture and biomass
Wilson et al 22, sub-canopy weather after fire and logging
Concepts
Jones et al 22, a very useful review of the concept of pyrodiversity, including recent work in the area. I’m curious to see how far this concept goes.
Seidl & Turner 22, how does reorganisation follow disturbance? (Disturbance is another big concept in fire research)
Pausas 22, western Palaearctic regimes. The preposterously prolific Juli Pausas takes us on a tour of the fire regimes attributes (area burnt, size, intensity, season, patchiness and pyrodiversity) of Europe, North Africa and the Near East. Hands up who’s heard of the word Palaearctic?
Drivers
Dorph et al 22, fuel moisture is a prominent cause in this paper on the drivers of ignitions. Missed opportunity to have ‘What sparks sparks?’ as the title.
Cai et al 22, what is climate change doing to ENSO? No one better to ask than Cai and friends.
Jones & O’Neill 16, if we’re going to project future climate, how should we think about changes in population? Answers here.
Health
Johnston et al 21, much cited paper documenting the human toll of smoke from the 2019-20 Australian forest fires
Xu et al 20, special report from the New England Journal of Medicine on the health impacts of wildfires in the context of climate change. Some eye opening statistics.
Shaposhnikov et al 14, documents the human toll of the Moscow heatwave and fire of 2010. It is scary how quickly studies of events like this recede into the distance as new events pile up.
Risk
Kemp et al 22, catastrophic climate change scenarios. Brutal but important stuff, this one got a fair bit of media coverage when it came out recently. I don’t enjoy reading the word endgame.
Kreibich et al 22, what does ‘unprecedented’ mean when we’re trying to manage the risk of floods and droughts? A lot, unfortunately, as this Nature paper shows.
Self-indulgent* forays into social science
*I’m talking about me here, not the authors, just to be crystal clear.
Paveglio et al 18, I’m quite interested in the concept of adaptive pathways as it relates to coexisting with fire. This paper from a few years ago puts forward a really interesting example of its application.
Thomas et al 22, I have a lot of time for the environmental justice movement. Interesting to see its application here to wildfire. I think we’ll see a lot more on equity and distributional aspects of wildfire and fire management in the coming years.