For the past several weeks, dozens of wildfires have scorched a destructive path across western forests and plains, threatening homes and habitat—as of this week, more than 5 million acres in California, Oregon and Washington have been destroyed by some of the largest wildfires in the region’s history. Monica Turner, a landscape ecologist in the Department of Integrative Biology, spent several decades studying the ecosystems of Yellowstone National Park after wildfires ravaged the park in 1988. For more than a decade, Turner, who just received the 2020 Eminent Ecologist Award from the Ecological Society of America, has warned that situations like the one that damaged Yellowstone could become more common. She took a few moments to put the current catastrophic wildfires into context for us.
Click here for original story, Q&A: Landscape ecologist says California wildfires aren’t a random situation
Source: Phys.org