President Donald Trump on Wednesday issued an executive order invoking the Defense Production Act to promote the domestic production of phosphorus and the weedkiller glyphosate, which he said is critical to both defense and food security. Glyphosate is often targeted by supporters of the Make America Healthy Again movement as a harmful chemical. Trump aligned with the MAHA movement after Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dropped out of the 2024 election. “I find that ensuring robust domestic elemental phosphorus mining and United States-based production of glyphosate-based herbicides is central to American economic and national security,” Trump said in the order. “Without immediate Federal action, the United States remains inadequately equipped and vulnerable.” Glyphosate … has been the subject of controversy over alleged links to cancer. Bayer, the company that makes the glyphosate-based weedkiller Roundup, recently proposed paying $7.25 billion to settle lawsuits claiming the chemical causes cancer.

ITHACA, N.Y.—Up to 30% of bird diversity hotspots, places where large numbers of different bird species occur, in the western United States face threats from high-severity wildfires in the future that could eliminate critical forest habitats, according to new research published in the journal Nature Communications. Scientists from the USDA Forest Service, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and University of New Mexico combined advanced fire forecasting with bird distribution data from eBird to create the first comprehensive map showing where changing fire regimes will have the most impact on bird communities across the western United States. “Advances in species distribution modeling using eBird data and fire forecasting give us an incredible lens into the future about how fire might impact biodiversity moving forward,” said Andrew Stillman, applied quantitative ecologist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “Thanks to these advances, we can move from a retroactive look at fire impacts to a forward-looking approach.”

New research from The Nature Conservancy, the University of California, Berkeley and the USDA Forest Service, published in the journal Forest Ecology and Management, details how wildfires could be leveraged to increase forest resilience to future high-severity fires across the Western United States. Wildfires can be a powerful regenerative force for nature. However, modern wildfires in forests across the Western US have become uncharacteristically destructive, largely due to climate change and more than a century of fire suppression. Mechanical thinning and prescribed fire are used to reduce wildfire size and severity, but compliance restrictions and logistical challenges, as well as agency staffing capacity and funding constraints, often limit the scale of their treatment. The paper recommends that forest managers work in and adjacent to recent wildfire footprints to increase the pace and scale of fuel treatments, including low-to-moderate-severity wildfires (beneficial wildfire), and outlines three pathways for effectively leveraging these footprints.

A research paper questions a key rationale for expanding road access in national forests. Lifting restrictions on road construction in national forests could lead to more wildfires, according to a newly published study. The research led by a senior scientist at The Wilderness Society — which opposes the Trump administration’s proposal to reopen forests to new roads and logging — reinforces earlier studies finding that fire ignitions are more numerous near forest roads, including for fires started by lightning. The new research, published in the Jan. 29 edition of Fire Ecology, examined a broader area than previous work, covering the contiguous U.S. and considering both fire incidence and size. Areas within 50 meters of a forest road, or about 164 feet, are as much as four times more likely than roadless areas to see fire ignitions, the study said, since many fires are human-caused. The paper also cited the work of numerous earlier studies with similar conclusions.