My 3 Greatest Revelations

1 Disturbance Is a Part of Life on Earth (and Often Good!)

Early on in my reporting for , I took a standard wildland firefighting class called . In it I learned about fire regimes—the frequency and intensity of fires in any given ecosystem. The boreal forest, for example, has a fire regime of low frequency—fires burn about every 50 to 150 years—and high intensity. Meanwhile, longleaf pine forests have regimes of low intensity but very high frequency—maybe just a couple of years in between. In both types of forest, fire influences things like soil, water, and carbon while also opening up canopies, delivering nutrients, and stimulating seed and root growth. These effects often increase the diversity of plant life, which can