Wildfires

Wildfires - Australia

The fire danger in New South Wales will peak today as firefighters battle 33 blazes across the state with some rural properties under threat. Watch-and-act alerts were issued for bushfires at Warrabah near Tamworth and Tingha Plateau in the state’s north-east with Fire and Rescue NSW warning fire activity was increasing in the area.

Wildfires - Chile - Update

Wildfires have now destroyed 41,200 hectares of forest land in southern and central Chile, the country's National Forestry Corporation (CONAF) said on Monday. The figure represents an increase of 45 percent from last year in the area of forest land razed in the fire season.

California Loses 18 million trees in 2018

It’s a measure of how severe the tree die-off in California has been in recent years that when the state announced Monday it lost another 18 million trees in 2018, a top forestry official pronounced the result “encouraging.”

That’s because California lost far more trees in the three prior years, including a jaw-dropping 62 million dead trees in 2016, due to a combination of drought and bark beetle infestation.

With rain and snow in the state increasing over the last two winters, experts proclaimed an end to the seven-year drought. But the state still faces a heightened fire danger after more than 147 million trees were lost over the last nine years.

Officials at the California Department of Forestry said that it typically takes at least three years of substantial rain and snow for trees stressed by drought to return to good health. That would mean the state’s forests could benefit from at least one more year of wet weather to recover from the brutally dry period of 2010 to 2016.