Burned Out
global briefs
Climate Change Impedes Wildfire Reforestation Efforts
Nearly 6,000 scientists signed a pledge to #ShutDownSTEM on June 10, the day of the Strike for Black Lives across higher education. (STEM is an acronym for science, technology, engineering and math.) They canceled lab meetings, halted research projects and actively confronted perceived racism in their institutions in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. Particles for Justice (ParticlesForJustice. org) physics collective members Brian Nord and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein helped develop the idea for the strike. They called on university science departments, national laboratories and all others engaged in scientific endeavors to stop business as usual for that one day. The aim was educating themselves and their colleagues about the role of their own institutions in perpetuating white supremacy and creating concrete actions they could take to reduce anti-Black bias after the strike. According to the Pew Research Center, only 24 percent of college faculty members were nonwhite as of 2017, and a study published in the March edition of the journal BioScience found that Black, Latino, Native American and other underrepresented scholars account for only 9 percent of faculty members in STEM fields.
A study published in Global Ecology and Biogeography of 22 burned areas across the southern Rocky Mountains found that forests are becoming less resilient to fire, turning into grasslands and shrublands instead. The research team, led by the University of Colorado at Boulder, projects that by 2050, as little as 3.5 to 6.3 percent of Douglas fir and ponderosa pine forests in the region will be able to recover after fires. Encompassing 710 square miles, from southern Wyoming through central and western Colorado to northern New Mexico, researchers used satellite images and ground measurements to reconstruct what the forests looked like before fires and assess how well the forests were recovering by counting juvenile trees and observing tree rings. The study shows that forest recovery declines significantly under warmer, drier conditions caused by climate change. The number of acres that have burned annually across the country has already doubled since the 1990s, so it may be better to plant seedlings in regions more likely to bounce back rather than in dry sites no longer suitable for survival.
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Scientists Confront Academic Racism
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Equality Matters
November 2020
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