How's My Sciencing?
A Few Future Fire Features Are Unfurled
Readers of this blog may have noticed that the flurry of activity occasionally documented herein has not actually translated into many peer reviewed scientific journal articles.
The above is a figure pulled from the abstract and citation database Scopus, owned by the academic publishing company Elsevier. The blue bars show the number of papers I have published each year and the black line counts the citations of those papers. I played the lead role in some (first author) and was a supporting actor for others (any position other than first author, although more on that in a minute).
As you can see, my output was at a low but steady rate for the first few years of my science career. Things picked up in 2019 and continued to grow over the next few years. In 2022 I moved to Melbourne to start my Westpac Research Fellowship (and this blog), and my publications completely cratered after that (I blame the blog). It’s usually at about this point I shout “Look! The Goodyear blimp!!” and quickly remove the blue bars so you can only see citations. Or just swap the whole thing out for something that makes me look better, like annual grant income or number of people met for coffee per day.
In reality, the number of publications is a lousy measure of productivity, scientific innovation, contribution to society or worth as a human. You and I both know that. Unfortunately, it is unquestionably part of how academics are judged - by grant reviewers, by hiring panels and by each other. On that slightly bitter note, it brings me great joy to report a few papers hot off the presses that will soon add some blue to the above plot. Come back in a year to find out whether or not the new blue is but a dead cat bounce.
Best and worst case scenarios of future atmospheric thirst
Title: The range of projected change in vapour pressure deficit through 2100: a seasonal and regional analysis of the CMIP6 ensemble
Link: https://doi.org/10.3390/cli13070143
The scientific story: This paper does what it says on the tin. Vapour pressure deficit (VPD) is a measure of atmospheric thirst - the hotter and drier the air, the better it is at sucking water out of plants, dead or alive. This has serious implications for landscape fire risk, not to mention agriculture and plant health more broadly. We are certainly not the first to peer into the crystal ball and ask what continued fossil fuel burning (get your act together, Australia), land clearing and the like will do to VPD. What we were the first to do, as far as we know, is systematically plot out the range of projected changes in VPD across a large number of IPCC climate models. Why does this matter? Well, people use climate model output all the time but it’s not always practical to use every single available model. This isn’t nefarious but it is worth bearing in mind. By understanding the range of change projected by the full set of models, we can
suss out best and worst case scenarios
add a layer of interpretation to existing studies in light of where their chosen models fall within this range (it might be interesting to know if the results of a given study are closer to best case or worst case scenarios, for example)
design future studies or government-backed regional climate change assessments, that sample from as much of this range as possible
The human story: This paper was written by an intrepid group of Masters of Data Science students that I supervised last year. Jiulong Xu led the charge and was ably assisted by his classmates Mingyang Yao, Yunjie Chen, Liuyue Jiang and Binghong Xing. It is a fantastic achievement for a Masters student to publish the results of their research; it doesn’t happen that often, partly because many will have moved on to work and other commitments after completing their studies. It’s a special moment for me too, as this is my first ever* paper as senior author (last place in the author list, denoting a supervisory / mastermindery role).
Future fuel face-off: hazard vs availability
Title: Fuelling future fires*: predicting variation in fuel hazard and availability across an environmental gradient
Link: https://doi.org/10.1071/WF24222
The scientific story: Another paper that does what it says on the tin. Fuel hazard is a term used in Victoria and other parts to represent aspects of fuel load and fuel structure that are pertinent to fire risk. Fuel availability is a term used to denote how much of the fuel is available to burn, and in this case it is synonymous with fuel dryness. All things being equal, greater fuel hazard means greater fire risk, and so does greater fuel availability. Spoiler alert: all things hardly ever are equal and a nice feature of this and a few related papers is the use of an environmental gradient. Check it:
The idea here is that a change in fuel dryness or fuel availability will not mean the same thing everywhere. Where fuel is already frequently available but average fuel loads are low (e.g. the Murray Darling Depression; MDD) then getting drier might not move the fire risk needle that much. Conversely, in the South East Corner (SEC) where there is plenty of fuel but it doesn’t often dry out, an increase in fuel load might not move the needle that much. You’ll note the copious use of weasel words like ‘might’. Predicting anything to do with living creatures is a task best left for smarter people than me.
There is a lot in this paper - enough to fill at least a whole post. There are fancy empirical models of fuel hazard, spread across the different strata of fuel (surface, near-surface, elevated and bark). There are models of fuel availability (based on our old friend, VPD). There are climate models, which are handily linked to the aforementioned models of hazard and availability to arrive at projections of their future state. And as noted, it’s all broken down into study regions spread across an environmental gradient. What you end up with, at least for one relatively hot and dry version of the future, is a set of changes in fuel hazard and availability like so:
Explaining this figure with its colourful bubbles and arrows could take a whole post, tbh, so here are two high level take homes. 1) It appears to be getting drier everywhere; the arrows are all pointing up rather than down, indicating an increase in fuel availability. 2) The fuel hazard remains stable or increases everywhere except the Murray Darling Depression (MDD: the arrow points to the left here, indicating a decrease in fuel hazard. Elsewhere it points to the right, indicating an increase, or doesn’t budge along the x-axis, indicating no change).
The human story: All credit to emerging research leader Sarah McColl-Gausden, who led this study. Lauren Bennett and Trent Penman chipped in, as did I. This is one of those times someone else does the heavy lifting, and you hope that your contributions were up to scratch. Like other so-called early career researchers, Sarah is currently engaged in a battle to the death to try and secure her next contract. If you are a hiring manager reading this, get out your checkbook. Ah, academia, you certainly treat us mean to keep us keen.
A lovingly crafted global dataset of the use of controlled fire to better control fire
Title: A global assemblage of regional prescribed burn records - GlobalRx
Link: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-04941-w
The scientific story: This paper also does what it says on the tin (we’re batting 1.000!). Prescribed fire is used all over the world. It is a matter of occasional contention (how’s my understatement?) and so what could be more useful than assembling a pile of records of prescribed burning across the planet, neatly packaged into ecoregions? For good measure the paper chucks in a bunch of highly salient covariates like fire weather conditions, land cover and protected area status.
The result is GlobalRx. Over 200,000 records spread across 16 countries (a fair whack from Australia) and over 200 ecoregions, all during the time period 1979-2023. There’s actually much more than just the data in here - lots of fascinating and important regional context including a provocative overview of how many of the burns in a few case study regions fell within official prescriptions (Figure 23, based on records from northern NSW and southeast Qld, is worthy of a whole post by itself), and barplots showing the spread of each country’s burns across different veg types (sample sizes range from 3 in Germany to 120,000 in Australia - told you it was a fair whack).
Incidentally, the Rx is borrowed from the medicinal use of those characters to represent a doctor’s prescription. The R comes from the Latin word for recipe, with the x actually starting off as a line through the right leg of the R to indicate an abbreviation (Thank you, Wikipedia).
The human story: Alice Hsu led a cast of thousands (almost - see below). Congrats to Alice, who like Sarah McColl-Gausden looks set to make a major impact in fire research in the coming years and decades, notwithstanding the aforementioned precarity of the sector. This is a really impressive data-centric study, global in scale and with plenty of intriguing figures. No surprise then that Matt ‘nothing by half measure’ Jones of State of Wildfires fame played a pivotal role in the paper’s development as Alice’s supervisor.
Here’s the author list btw - see if you can spot Future Fire.
Alice Hsu, Matthew W. Jones, Jane R. Thurgood, Adam J. P. Smith, Rachel Carmenta, John T. Abatzoglou, Liana O. Anderson, Hamish Clarke, Stefan H. Doerr, Paulo M. Fernandes, Crystal A. Kolden, Cristina Santín, Tercia Strydom, Corinne Le Quéré, Davide Ascoli, Marc Castellnou, Johann G. Goldammer, Nuno Ricardo Gracinhas Nunes Guiomar, Elena A. Kukavskaya, Eric Rigolot, Veerachai Tanpipat, Morgan Varner, Youhei Yamashita, Johan Baard, Ricardo Barreto, Javier Becerra, Egbert Brunn, Niclas Bergius, Julia Carlsson, Chad Cheney, Dave Druce, Andy Elliot, Jay Evans, Rodrigo De Moraes Falleiro, Nuria Prat-Guitart, J. Kevin Hiers, Johannes W. Kaiser, Lisa Macher, Dave Morris, Jane Park, César Robles, Rosa María Román-Cuesta, Gernot Rücker, Francisco Senra, Lara Steil, Jose Alejandro Lopez Valverde & Emma Zerr
Happy reading! (or clever prompt-guided AI-summarising, if that’s your bag)
*Keen-eyed readers may recall that I have a couple of other senior author papers on the boil, courtesy of the hard work and moxie of Cait Symon. I think I’m starting to get the hang of this pyramid scheme skillfully and ethically enhancing my research output through supervision.
** Readers verging on the obsessive may recall I once used a similar title for a post (Fuelling Fire Research), about some fire-related proposals that had recently won the Australian funding jackpot. Yes, I’m writing this footnote because there’s been some new announcements. Firstly, I am sorry to say I know of a few awesome fire-related proposals that did not get funded. Generally 80-90% of all proposals to these schemes do not get funded. Yech.
Did anything fire-relevant get funded?
Out of 50 approved Early Career Industry Fellowships, not a single one included the word fire in its Project Summary. There was one from a colleague here at Melbourne Uni on coastal hazards (congrats Rebecca Morris! Will you have a coffee with me?). Another was on collaborative and evidence-based disaster governance (congrats Margaret Cook! You’re 2,000 km away so let’s do a zoom coffee!).
Out of 17 approved Laureate Fellowships, not a single one included the word fire in its Project Summary. There was one from a colleague here at Melbourne Uni on ocean governance (congrats Tiffany Morrison! Will you have a coffee with me?)
Out of 100 approved Future Fellowships, not a single one included the word fire in its Project Summary. There was one on ocean governance (congrats Michelle Voyer! You’re 1,000 km away so let’s do a zoom coffee!). Another was on place-based values held by groups underrepresented in adaptation-planning (congrats Sonia Graham! You’re also 1,000 km away so let’s do a zoom coffee!). Another was on climate vulnerability, uninsurability and risk governance (congrats Jathan Sadowski! You’re around the corner so let’s do coffee!).
[The following was added after the post was published because I didn’t realise these outcomes had also been released, d’oh!] Out of 25 approved Mid-Career Industry Fellowships, one included the word fire in its Project Summary, but it’s about fire-safe cladding, rather than the sort of stuff we talk about around here. Still fantastically important, so congrats Pingan Song and all the best with the project. There was one Fellowship awarded to a project on science for monitoring biodiversity to meet Australia’s policy needs. I’m happy to say that I am already in regular contact with the successful recipient, Emily Nicholson, but this is a good excuse to have another coffee. Congrats Emily!
Another great read :)
Woohoo - go Sarah!! What a legend!