Jonathan Myers, associate professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, and Solny Adalsteinsson, staff scientist at Tyson Research Center, participated in a Future of Fire Consortium that produced both a scholarly review and a blog item in the Journal of Ecology, both published online June 8. They were among over 40 scientists who wrote that there exist three “emergent themes” requiring further study regarding “ecological causes and consequences of future fires and rethinking fire management alternatives.”
In the wake of a 2019-20 global wildfire season that proved to be the most destructive, longest and largest on record, these scientists agreed that the field must: study across temporal scales; assess ecological feedbacks; and improve modeling involving fire.
“A key strength of this review is the diversity of ecological, geophysical and sociological perspectives that went into synthesizing the current state of the field and defining priorities for future research,” Myers said. “The Future of Fire Consortium included researchers working at all spatial and temporal scales of fire science, from microscale studies of fire behavior spanning seconds to minutes to macroscale studies of fires and climate change spanning tens of thousands of years.”