Forests

"Spring wildfires across Siberia have Russian authorities on alert for a potentially devastating summer season of blazes after an unusually warm and dry winter in one of the world’s climate-change hot spots."

"Personal protective equipment may not be sufficient to protect firefighters battling wildfires from Covid-19 because unavoidable smoke inhalation may increase their disease risk, researchers say."

"When a wildfire explodes out of control and threatens property and lives, thousands of firefighters and support crews rush to the scene from around the country and even the world. Almost overnight a small city sprouts up, with firefighters camped in dense rows of tents in fields and eating in crowded mess halls."

"All day it had been sunny. Then it grew dark as the winds began to whip. Daniel Felder stepped out into the road to watch the acrid smoke billow toward him. Ash started raining from the sky like light snow drifting in twilight."

"The scientists who study how diseases emerge in a changing environment knew this moment was coming. Climate change is making outbreaks of disease more common and more dangerous."

"A new study takes aim at the idea that environmental reviews take too long for timber and other projects in national forests."

"The tree helped build industrial America before disease wiped out an estimated three billion or more of them. To revive their lost glory, we may need to embrace tinkering with nature."

"Almost everywhere he looks, Lee Frelich sees the fingerprints of climate change on the forests he has studied since he was a boy half a century ago."

"Huge swaths of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest are drier than usual after a rainy season with rainfall index well below historical levels, raising concerns about a further spike in wildfires and deforestation as the dry season approaches."

"President Jair Bolsonaro is moving aggressively to open up the Amazon rainforest to commercial development, posing an existential threat to the tribes living there."

"URU EU WAU WAU TERRITORY, Brazil — The billboard at the entrance of a tiny Indigenous village in the Amazon has become a relic in less than a decade, boasting of something no longer true.

“Here, there is investment by the federal government,” proclaims the sign, erected in 2012, which is now shrouded by fallen palm tree fronds.