…fires have raged across tens of thousands of hectares of forest, leaving devastation in their wake. …Therefore we need far more detailed information about the distribution of fire risks in the landscapes where fires are most common and comprehensive information about the forests to feed the models which are used to assess possible developments of fires and fire-fighting strategies. For long-term forest fire prevention, we need to change the structure of forests: from large monocultures to patchy forest landscapes with a wide variety of forests. This may require breaking up stands, clusters of trees, composed of high fire risk species to make them more diverse. We need to assess the fuel amount, structure and consistency of forests for fire in order to do relevant fire risk assessments. All of these elements, in addition to training and educating fire crews and the local population, will be necessary to prepare forests and forestry for the future. 

In Peru’s Sacred Valley, a community-led initiative is creating fire prevention brigades to stop devastating wildfires before they even begin. Peru’s Sacred Valley, the breathtaking landscape between Cusco and Machu Picchu, has always had a few conventional fire brigades, but anyone who has ever witnessed a bushfire will know there is little you can do once it takes hold. While there is a place for carefully managed burning – at the right time of year and in the right weather conditions it can clear land of brush and understory – reckless burns can be catastrophic. “Years of hard work can be undone in a single day,” says Joaquín Randall, who has set up the NGO Valle Sagrado Verde, a reforestation project planting native trees such as huaranhuay, chachacomo, molle and tara in the Sacred Valley. “2020 was a really bad year. One fire burned 20,000 replanted trees in one go. Another killed eight people.”

Lesley Reilly

THEY were known affectionately as ‘Lumberjills’ during the second world war.  In 1942 hundreds of women and girls as young as 14 were recruited  to replace male loggers in Scotland who had left to serve their country.  They were expected to do everything their male counterparts were involved in including felling, snedding, loading trucks and trains and milling timber all over Scotland. …There are currently 40 apprentices at Forestry Land Scotland (FLS) – the Scottish Government agency responsible for managing national forests – and 11 of these are women. A further ten female, mid-year students have joined FLS in the past three years, as part of the organisation’s work-based learning programme. Female employees include Lesley Reilly, an expert chainsaw operator with FLS, who recently felled a particularly large, diseased ash on the site of a former ironworks – now a woodland – at Wilsontown  in Lanarkshire. 

Humanity’s understanding of how forests are responding to climate change is disconcertingly fragile. Take carbon fertilization, for example — the phenomenon by which plants absorb more carbon dioxide as its concentration in the atmosphere increases. This is one of the principal mechanisms by which nature has so far saved us from the worst of climate change, but there’s little understanding of its future trajectory. In fact, researchers don’t fully understand how climate change interacts with a multitude of forest processes. Complex, unsolved questions include how climate warming affects forest health; how it affects the performance of forests as a carbon sink; and whether it alters the ecosystem services that forests provide. Forests are our life-support system, and we should be more serious about taking their pulse.  Six papers in this week’s Nature provide important insights into those questions.