Wildfire magazine, Issue 3, 2025.
Wildfire is published quarterly for the greater global wildland fire community and for members of the International Association of Wildland Fire. The magazine serves as a storytelling and network building platform, exemplifying our role as a unique supporter and unifier of fire professionals across the globe.
The Fire Season collection of books gather a diverse community of visual artists, poets, and writers to look at wildfire as part of more complex topics like grief, climate change, loss, new growth, renewal, changing ideas of landscape, resilience and economy. For anyone, anywhere grappling with the reality of longer, more severe wildfire seasons, Fire Season is for you.
Liz Toohey-Wiese, is a Fine Arts professor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey, British Columbia. As a landscape painter, since 2018 her art practice has focused on the subject of wildfires.
“Over the years, this research has taken many forms, including painting post-burn landscapes, interviewing wildfire fighters and fire lookouts, installing billboards, and recently completing my S-100 wildfire fighting course.
“Every two years I also publish an artist book with my collaborator Amory Abbott. Titled Fire Season, the book brings together visual art and writing that engage with the realities of wildfire.”
Toohey-Wiese explains that Fire Season was launched as a means of collective sense-making around wildfires.
“The book is not intended to assign blame or propose tidy solutions to this complex and ongoing crisis. Instead, it gathers a wide range of voices—artists, academics, writers, wildfire fighters, Indigenous community members, and people working in logging, government policy, and environmental activism—who contribute their stories, ideas, and questions to a broader conversation.
The next edition of Fire Season will be released in the northern hemisphere summer of 2026, and the call for submissions is currently open with a deadline of April 15, 2026.
They are seeking submissions of visual art, photography, film, performance, material-based processes, academic writing, essays, anecdotes, prose, poetry, or any other printable form of expression. Previous issue had a strong focus on British Columbia fires, but submissions are welcome from anyone, anywhere around the world.
“We tend to favour personal writing over journalistic or strictly scientific papers. For those who work in wildfire-related fields, we invite reflections on what you feel about your profession, what cannot be expressed in official reports, and what you wish the public understood about your work and research. We look forward to hearing from you.”
For full submission details, visit the website www.fireseason.org.
You can also explore the Featured Works section to see examples from previous editions.
Toohey-Wiese spoke about the Fire Season project at the 18th International Wildland Fire Safety Summit and the 7th Human Dimensions of Wildland Fire Conference in Calgary, Canada, in October last year.
The United States had far more wildfires, but far fewer acres burned, than normal in 2025, according to a newly released report.
The National Interagency Fire Center, the home of U.S. wildland fire planning and suppression efforts, released its annual national wildfire report on Friday, which shows just how abnormal 2025 was.
The reported number of wildfires nationwide was noticeably higher than the five and 10-year averages, according to the report. Nearly 77,850 wildfires burned throughout the nation in 2025, compared with the 5-year average of 61,680 and the 10-year average of 62,435.
Conversely, the high number of wildfires burned far under the normal amount of acres nationwide. Wildfires in 2025 burned 5,131,474 acres, below the 5-year average of 7.3 million burned acres and the 10-year average of 7.6 million burned acres.
Southern states, from Virginia to Texas, had just under half of the nation’s total wildfires at 37,088, by far the highest number of reported wildfires compared with any other region in the nation, according to the report. The largest wildfire of 2025 was Dragon Bravo in Arizona, burning 145,504 acres. The southern region also nearly had the nation’s most burned acres at 967,000, second only to the Alaska region with 1,006,000 burned acres, and had over half of the nation’s reported human-caused wildfires at 36,040.
Eastern states, from Maine to Missouri and Minnesota, had by far the highest increases in both reported wildfires and burned acres compared with every other region’s 10-year average. The region’s burned acre total of 241,000 acres was 159% higher than its 10-year average of burned acres, while its reported wildfire total of 15,367 was 50% higher than its 10-year average of reported wildfires.
Center officials processed an above-average number of requests for resources filed nationwide at over 660,000 requests, including critical supply orders. Requests for crew, overhead, and helicopter mobilizations were well above previous averages, while requests for air tankers, engines, and critical incident management team mobilizations fell below averages.
2025 was a big year for fire across northern Australia. This graphic shows the full extent of the 10 biggest wildfire events across Australia in 2025.
While much of the attention is usually focused on wildfires in the more populated regions across southern Australia, the fires that burn the most area are further north. The largest was in the Tanami Desert, burning more than 3.5 million hectares (8.6 million acres), through central Northern Territory. Dozens of lightning strike ignitions coalesced into one enormous conflagration.
The next biggest was through a vast swath of country south of Broome in Western Australia at 1.2m ha (2.9m acres). The combined total, including eight other large fires burnt close to 10 million ha (24.7m acres) in 2025.
Rohan Fisher, Director Landscape Knowledge Visualisation Lab at Charles Darwin University, compiled the summary.
“It’s just a few fires at the wrong time that burn most country. Fire size distribution is fascinating and provides important lessons on how we think about fire behaviour and its management. I am hoping to publish a deeper analysis of this as it relates to our most fire-prone landscapes in the near future,” Fisher said.
UPDATE 4 April 2025 – here is the full report for the 2025 fire year across NAFI burnt area, which covers 80% of the Australian landmass. The 2025 fire year across the North Australia and Rangelands Fire Information (NAFI) mapping region was characterised by extensive fire activity, with a total of 656,125 km² burnt, making it the second largest fire year in the past decade, exceeded only by 2023.
Fisher’s data for this view is from the Northern Australia Fire Information (NAFI) web service, which has struggled to secure ongoing funding in recent years. NAFI was allocated partial funding in the 2026-27 Federal Budget but faces a funding shortfall for 2026-27.
NAFI wants $4.5 million over four years from 2026-27 but the 2026-27 funding allocated is around $300,000 under what it claims it needs to operate reliably.
NAFI covers 80 percent of Australia and is the only fire information service tailored to the bushfire management needs of rural and remote land managers across such a huge area.
Here is a NAFI video animation for the 2025 fire year in Australia.
View and download mp4 videos of fire spread from NAFI maps for 31 regions across Australia. It is a great tool for communicating about northern Australia fire and for close analysis for fire behaviour fans.
Around 24,000 people die in the United States annually due to wildfire smoke, according to a study published in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday.
Researchers from Harvard and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai noticed that most previous smoke research either focused exclusively on smoke’s acute impacts on human health or focused on specific timeframes rather than long-term effects. They instead looked into the association between annual exposure to fine particulate matter from wildfire smoke, which contains carcinogenic compounds and heavy metals, and county-level mortality in over 3,000 counties across the U.S, in the study funded by the National Institute of Health.
They found that wildfire smoke was responsible for ~24,100 deaths every year, with no evidence of a “safe” threshold of wildfire smoke exposure. The researchers also found that people with neurological diseases, like dementia or Parkinson’s, experienced the greatest increase in mortality when exposed to wildfire smoke. People with circulatory system illnesses, endocrine diseases and cancers saw the next highest increases.
“For all studied outcomes, the exposure-response curves generally showed an increasing trend as exposure levels rose, especially at higher exposure levels,” the researchers said in the study. “In addition, greater effects of wildfire smoke PM2.5 were observed in communities with a higher percentage of the population under 65 years old, in more rural areas, and during lower summer and winter temperatures.”
Previous research released in September estimated that the U.S. could see an additional 46,000 deaths annually by 2050. The additional deaths are primarily attributed to climate change, which is making already fire-prone regions in the U.S. hotter and drier.
“Because of the mortality effects we uncover at low annual smoke concentrations, we project large mortality burdens not only in heavy smoke regions but also in populous regions with low smoke concentrations (e.g., the eastern US),” the researchers said in the study published in September. “Similarly, we estimate substantial mortality increases even in the low warming scenario because of projected increases in low-level annual smoke concentration.”
PREVIOUS COVERAGE: Wildfire smoke will kill more people in US, but where is up for debate
Four industry heavyweights will combine resources in a $100 million push for advance early detection and coordinated response to wildfires.
Lockheed Martin, Pacific Gas and Electric Company, Salesforce and Wells Fargo have formed a joint venture in artificial intelligence, autonomous systems and other technologies “to detect, prevent and fight wildfires”.
The announcement of the new venture – Emberpoint – is short on specifics on how the $100 million will be spent or how and where the outputs will be used, but says “agencies and utilities will gain access to proven, state-of-the-art systems without the burden of development costs, enabling communities to benefit from advanced, affordable wildfire prevention.”
This venture is one of many similar initiatives currently active around the world, and it not entirely clear how much is being done in cooperation and how much in competition.
Lockheed Martin and PG&E, for example, are already supporters of the XPRIZE Wildfire, which last week announced its five finalist teams in the Autonomous Wildfire Response Track, an $11 million global competition for teams developing innovative wildfire technology.
The venture has a strong US focus, but given the corporate reach of the four partners, the potential benefits could flow beyond those borders into other wildfire regions.
“It’s time to change the way we think about wildfires and bring the best of American technology and know-how to this growing threat to lives and property. Devastating wildfires are on the rise and this new partnership brings four leading companies in the aerospace, electrical power, tech, and financial industries together to address this national problem,” said Lockheed Martin Chairman, President and CEO Jim Taiclet.
“Building on Lockheed Martin’s leading-edge capabilities in space and ground-based sensing systems, autonomous air and land drones, and command and control systems, EMBERPOINT™ aims to combine these skills along with those of our partners to address what is a true national security mission.”
Taiclet was quoted in the Los Angeles Times saying Emberpoint had $100 million committed to the venture from partners.
Other partners were more definitive in the scope.
“This partnership underscores our commitment to ending catastrophic wildfires,” said PG&E Corporation CEO, Patti Poppe.
“We plan to seek regulatory approval to pair Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s on-the-ground experience with our partners’ advanced technology, and properly scale how we identify risk, prevent incidents, and protect the people and ecosystems we serve for the benefit of all society—while staying fully focused on providing safe and reliable energy to our customers. Today’s announcement marks the next step in a broader, multi-phase effort to end catastrophic wildfires.”
Lockheed Martin is a global defense technology company with a significant involvement in wildfire work, particularly with its Sikorsky aerial firefighting aircraft (BlackHawk, FireHawk) and its ongoing development of an autonomous helicopter as part of the Rain.aero venture. It is headquartered in Maryland but claims 350 facilities across the US and worldwide.
Pacific Gas and Electric Company, a subsidiary of PG&E Corporation based in Oakland, California, has 16 million customers in north and central California. It will bring “deep wildfire mitigation experience, with proven layers of protection and a track record of deploying effective risk management programs across geographically-diverse communities.”
San Francisco based software company Salesforce will contribute its skills in “integrating disparate data streams into a unified, real-time response engine” using the power of its messaging app Slack and its AI building platform Agentforce.
Wells Fargo, the US-based multinational financial services company, is helping to fund the venture through a capital investment.
A senior FEMA official is facing questions after media published the claim he received wildfire relief payments from the fund he was administering for victims of a 2022 New Mexico fire.
According to the report in Source NM and NMPBS, Jay Mitchell is in charge of FEMA’s multi-billion-dollar fund to compensate victims of New Mexico’s 2022 Hermits Peak Fire, which remains New Mexico’s most destructive wildfire with 430 homes impacted in communities northwest of Las Vegas. The report claims he received a six-figure payout over the past year for damages the fire caused, despite the properties in question being over an hour’s drive from where the fire actually burned.
Documents produced by Source NM appear to show Mitchell was paid $266,000 for smoke and ash cleaning costs for his house and guest home in Angel Fire, New Mexico, a ski resort town over 40 miles north of where the fire burned. The same documents show that Mitchell’s wife, reportedly a licensed real estate broker selling property in Angel Fire, got more payments totaling over $250,000 for business-related losses she allegedly incurred during the fire.
Other homeowners in Mitchell’s neighborhood told Source NM that smoke from the Hermits Peak Fire did not cause any discoloration or damage to their homes or to those of anyone they knew.
The payouts to Mitchell were made as 74 people or families who lost their homes in the wildfire are still awaiting compensation nearly four years after the fire burned, according to recent estimates from the claims office reported by Source NM. Michell was placed in charge of the compensation fund approved by Congress after it was determined that the wildfire was caused by two botched prescribed burns overseen by the U.S. Forest Service.
Multiple New Mexico lawmakers have since called on Michell to resign after Source NM’s reporting was released, including senators Martin Heinrich and Ben Ray Luján, along with representatives Teresa Leger Fernández and Martin Zamora.
Two years ago, another FEMA director resigned amid criticism of the government’s mishandling of relief payments to victims of the same New Mexico wildfire.