Lava Flow

Caught once again in an eruption of journal articles

It’s January 16 and a few months have passed since I dipped into the recent literature (i.e. peer reviewed journal articles) on wildfire (and bushfire). Over a few days, I skimmed about 1,000 titles that came out over the last few months, 129 of which made the cut and have now been added to my fire references folder, yielding a current total of 3,076. Like a good book shelf that will never be read, my collection of articles pleases me no end.

I can shave off just a tiny bit of my guilt at rarely reading them closely by sharing a few with you, dear reader, thereby claiming I am doing some kind of public service. Just what that public service is, I can’t quite say. Am I educating you? Not really. Not about the contents of the papers, anyway. Am I making a commentary about the industrial nature of science today? I guess a little bit. Am I proving that I’m a master of my domain, up to date with the latest developments in my field? Sadly, no. Am I saying that to understand fire, we need knowledge from many disciplines in many locations? Well, yes, but the list below doesn’t really prove that point, at the best it suggests it. Will any of these (or my occasional contributions) make a lick of difference to how we understand, manage or live with fire? That might be for you to answer.

The perfect-coned Mayon volcano erupts as seen from the Our Lady of the Gate Parish Church, Daraga, Albay (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Prefatory material be damned, here’s a sample of what I picked up. As will soon become obvious, the one line summaries are mine so you’ll have to click through for the official title and, if you’re lucky and there’s no paywall, the full text. If you’re interested but can’t get hold of one, sing out and I’ll see what I can do to make a copy materialise.

• Stakeholder focus groups on fire management (Portugal)

• Nature-based solutions for Indigenous estate (Australia)

• Strange beauty in burnt environments (Australia)

• Quantification of fuel break and suppression effectiveness (US)

• What tree cover loss is doing to water (Global)

• A dataset of post-fire forest regrowth (Global)

• Just add machine learning for better fire behaviour modelling

• Thawing permafrost and fires in the Arctic and Sub-arctic

• Political ecology and the wildfire blame game (Greece edition)

• Tracking the interaction between land use, fire management and fire (Spain)

• Building fire regime classifications from water and climate (US)

• Ignition modelling (Turkey)

• Satellite vs fire agency records & implications for fuel (Australia) (Hi, Doug!)

• Predicting the number and location of deployed firefighters (US)

• Where residents get fire info from (US)

• Smoke impacts on eye health (Australia)

• Future fire weather (Portugal)

• Big fires make warming worse locally (Northern Hemisphere forests)

• Communicating with the public about fire using maps (Australia)

• Grassland fire behaviour (Australia)

• Social co-governance of fire management (China)

• Are fire-prone neighbourhoods built to allow residents to escape? (US)

• Burned area as a function of climate (Portugal)

• Indigenous land care and risk mitigation (Hawaii)

• A charter for fire-adapted settlements (Australia)

• Researchers make tools for fire managers. Do fire managers use them? (Canada)

• An anthropological take on fire with accompanying website exhibition (Australia)

• Don’t forget the kids (Australia)

• Fire and rocks (Australia)

• The rocky relationship between roads and fire (Global)

• Destructive fires are fast (US)

• Machine learning models that make sense (having your cake and eating it too; US)

• Empathy, compassion, narratives and fire (US)

• Why do people move into recently burnt areas? (US)

• Panarchistic architecture for wildfire resilience

• Hydroclimate whiplash: sudden, large and/or frequent transitions between very hot and very dry conditions (yes it’s as bad as it sounds; Global)

• Radiocarbon dating of culturally significant trees for fire management (Australia)

• Non-agency drivers of firefighter safety policy changes (US)

• 35% increase in the wildland-urban interface in last 20 years (Global)

• Battle royale between people, fire, rain, heat and wind to determine tree cover in the tropics (Hi, Doug!)

• Are neo-rural settlers an antidote to land abandonment? (Portugal)

• Predicting cloud to ground lightning (US)

• Putting the Hot Dry Windy index through its paces (Canada)

• Emergency management and business continuity - an on the ground account of the response to hurricane and fire (Canada)

• Smoke gets in your genes (epigenetic aging markers; Australia)

• Foehn modelling (Swiss & Austrian analogue of Santa Ana / Diablo winds)

• 87,000 excess deaths from wildfire smoke in Indonesia in 2019

• Climate change makes events like France’s extreme 2022 fire season more likely

• We can reconstruct not just past fires, but their intensity

• We can reconstruct not just past fires, but their intensity (you heard me right)

• Vertical fuel continuity key to fire severity (US)

• I’ll see your lightning prediction and raise you lightning suppression

• First Nations leadership & partnership in wildfire response (Canada)

• Drivers of rural property loss from wildfire (US)

• Today I learned the word emoterial (new book on early modern fire)

• Resident experiences of bushfire defence (Australia)

• Climate change makes events like Canada’s record-breaking 2023 fire season more likely

• Climate change makes events like Australia’s record-breaking 2019-20 fire season more likely

• Metaphors matter for how we respond to fire (I knew it!)

• Connecting local ecological knowledge with earth system models (love the font of this journal btw; US)