That's not a review, this is a review
Keeping up with the Jones et al
Computer languages are pale imitations of actual spoken languages and I have never quite forgiven myself for swapping German and Spanish for R and python. The same could be said of the writing in scientific journal articles compared to that found in books and essays. Plainly speaking, a lot of journal articles can be hard work to read - and I count my own among these.
One publication format with an increased chance of containing digestible, and occasionally delectable writing, is the review. My fondness for reviews probably stems from my days as a student, when it didn’t feel like a sure thing that you would find a recent review of a topic, and if you did it was like a magic ticket speeding you to the front of the knowledge queue. Back then, good reviews were must reads.
They still are of course, but these days it is hard enough to keep up with the reviews in any given field, let alone all the primary research. I bet there are one or two reviews in my ‘skim’ folder, which is scandalous, I know. Seriously, how does anyone keep up with their reading these days? Leave your answers in the comments please, I could do with some help.
One review cropped up recently that I was determined to spend some time with: Global and Regional Trends and Drivers of Fire Under Climate Change, published by Matt Jones and veritable who’s who of coauthors in Reviews of Geophysics. I initially held off because I was intimidated by its size. It’s 76 pages long! To be fair there are 20 pages of references, so there’s really only 56 pages to read closely. I was also slightly crestfallen, because I have been planning for some time (and intend to continue planning for quite some time more) my own review of fire weather and climate change studies but on reflection I happily decided that there is still a niche for what I have planned.
Anyway, once you get into the paper, it has a certain rhythm and methodological consistency that makes the volume much easier to take. First up the authors clear through the thickets, covering off on things like recent developments in remote sensing, the concept of fire danger indices, improvements in lightning detection and modelling, the thorny question of human-fire interactions, and finally some of the fanciest tools with which we’ve thrown the kitchen sink at the fire-climate-vegetation modelling problem.
Jones and colleagues then get down to business, presenting a set of analyses of patterns, relationships, trends and projections of fire activity and key drivers like fire weather, biomass, lightning and human population. They are very clear about the datasets their analyses are based on, and earth is helpfully split up into subcontinental regions and a smaller set of focus regions, including the Southeast Australian Forests that occupy a great deal of my own research focus.
The paper finishes with a lengthy discussion of the authors’ opinion of the next frontiers in predicting the name of this newsletter. Improving global dynamic models is the major one, with machine learning getting a guernsey, along with better representations of ignition, suppression (a perennially thorny phenomenon) and fire spread. Throughout the paper there is a steady back and forth between the broader literature and the fulsome analysis contributed by the authors, making it a review with a twist, a dialogue of sorts.
I still have my work cut out for me digesting the paper and its analyses, but let’s cheat for a moment and pull a few highlights from the abstract. Because of the considerable amount of primary research presented, it reads a bit more like a research abstract than a review abstract anyway.
Fire weather controls the annual timing of fires in most world regions and often drives inter-annual variability in burned area.
Increases in the frequency and extremity of fire weather have been globally pervasive due to climate change during 1979–2019, meaning that landscapes are primed to burn more frequently.
Increases in burned of ∼50% or higher have been seen in some extratropical forest ecoregions though interannual variability remains large.
Nonetheless, other bioclimatic and human factors can override the relationship between burned area and fire weather. Examples include fuel production in savannahs and deforestation and forest degradation in tropical forests.
Overall, burned area has reduced by 27% globally in the past two decades, due in large part to declines in African savannahs.
According to climate models, the prevalence and extremity of fire weather has already emerged beyond its pre-industrial variability in the Mediterranean due to climate change, and emergence will become increasingly widespread at additional levels of warming.
Moreover, several of the major wildfires experienced in recent years, including the Australian bushfires of 2019/2020, have occurred amidst fire weather conditions that were considerably more likely due to climate change.
Overall, climate change is exerting a pervasive upwards pressure on fire
globally by increasing the frequency and intensity of fire weather, and this upwards pressure will escalate with each increment of global warming.
It is, as they say, a lot. A paper this big almost feels like too much. Almost, but not quite. If I can tackle Ulysses (or rather, it tackled me), then surely I can give this impressive behemoth a crack.
Questions while…
Contemplating the translation of science to policy.
My boss had some words about this recently, pointing out that it doesn’t happen automatically and depends to a large extent on relationships and trust. A previous boss made a similar point when we were discussing knowledge brokers. We both agreed on the importance of brokering knowledge (or failing that, just breaking it), but my boss pointed out that merely having the title doesn’t imply that you know how to do it. Of course this applies to many jobs, usually with the word ‘manager’ in them. It made me wonder how much of the translation of fire science to fire management comes down to a relatively small set of influential individuals and relationships, and how much we can thank institutional structures for.
Song parodies
Surely I’m not the only one that makes up my own alternative lyrics to songs. Anyway, here’s one to the tune of The Beatles ‘You’re going to lose that girl’.
You’re going to lose that paper (yes, yes you’re going to lose that paper)
You’re going to loooose that paper
If you don’t get that paper out tonight, they’re gonna publish first (they’re gonna publish first)
So I will cut some corners and submit (cut corners and submit)
You’re going to lose that paper (yes, yes you’re going to lose that paper)
You’re going to lose, lose, lose that paper
(Obviously, The Beatles are an absolute goldmine of exploitable alternative lyrics. Since moving from the sleepy Blue Mountains to bustling Melbourne, I’ve been hearing “Don’t run me down!” in my head)