Protecting an endangered bat from wildfire leads to global environmental award

Iroro Tanshi’s passion for protecting wildlife grew through the cracks of her childhood in an industrial, oil-producing town in southern Nigeria. Her efforts to protect an endangered bat has led to an international award for wildfire prevention across her community.

While her community had few green spaces, her love for nature was kindled through documentaries. Her environmental science degree allowed her to put what she saw on screen into action, leading her to become a wildfire mitigator and ecologist, and recently being awarded the 2026 Goldman Environmental Prize.

Her notoriety came after she discovered a roost of endangered bats in 2016, which hadn’t been documented globally in five years and hadn’t been seen in Nigeria for over 45 years. The short-tailed roundleaf bats have large ears, round button noses, and live on fruit, pollen, nectar, and insects.

Just two weeks after her discovery, a devastating wildfire swept through the forest, causing Tanshi to commit to improving wildfire prevention in the area and launching the Zero Wildfire Campaign. The effort resulted in residents of five villages leading wildfire-prevention efforts in their own communities and the creation of an early-warning wildfire detection system.

“Under Iroro’s leadership, community forest guardians responded to 74 fire outbreaks on farms from early 2022 to spring 2025, successfully preventing any of them from escalating into unmanageable wildfires,” officials with the Goldman Environmental Prize wrote in a blog post. “Her Zero Wildfire Campaign has safeguarded the biodiverse 24,700-acre Afi Mountain Wildlife Sanctuary from devastating wildfires, protecting Nigeria’s stronghold for short-tailed roundleaf bats. At the same time, the program has secured the crops and livelihoods of roughly 27,000 people in 16 surrounding communities.”

Click here to read her full story.

Firefighter dies, over 120 homes burn as historic drought fuels southeast wildfires

Numerous Southeast US states are currently experiencing historic levels of drought, fueling wildfires that have caused one death and have destroyed over 120 homes.

Over 50% of the southeast region, from Virginia to Mississippi, is experiencing exceptional-to-extreme drought levels, with the entire region under at least a moderate drought category as of Thursday, according to the National Integrated Drought Information System. Portions of the region have experienced the driest period between September and March since record keeping began in 1895.

Florida currently has the most active wildfires in the U.S., with 13 fires burning over 28,000 acres, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. The volunteer fire department in Hilliard, Florida, on Friday announced the line-of-duty death of firefighter James “Kevin” Crews, who experienced a medical emergency while fighting the Old Divie Highway Fire.

“Our department and our community have lost a hero,” said Hilliard Volunteer Fire Chief Jerry Johnson. “Kevin was the epitome of courage and dedication. His sacrifice will never be forgotten. We are focused on supporting his family and our personnel during this unimaginably difficult time.”

Numerous structures in Georgia are also threatened, with 87 homes burned in Brantley County, the most destroyed by a single wildfire in the state’s history, and 35 other homes in Clinch and Echols counties.

“We have over 800 homes that are in harm’s way right now,” Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp said at a press conference on Friday. “The Georgia National Guard has six air assets available to help with fire suppression. The Department of Natural Resources’ response teams are deployed, as well as the Insurance Commissioner’s Office.”

Forecasters expect the region’s very dry conditions to persist, with minimum relative humidity of 20-30%. Wind is expected to remain light in the coming days, outside of sea breezes that develop near the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. Dead trees littering some forests after 2024’s Hurricane Helene are adding to the already abundant fuel.

PREVIOUS COVERAGE: ‘Significant’ spring wildfire risk in southeast US, driven by hurricane damage and drought

AI predicts wildfire risk faster than current warning systems, new study finds

A wildfire forecasting system powered by artificial intelligence was around 30% better at identifying dangerous fire conditions in advance than the models currently used, according to new research.

The Australian and New Zealand researchers’ study, published in the International Journal of Wildland Fire, trained a machine learning model on historical weather and fire data from three different fire-climate regimes across Australia, specifically the subtropical Sunshine Coast, peri-urban Brisbane and temperate Hobart areas. They then tested it against Australia’s current wildfire risk system, the fuel-specific Fire Behaviour Index.

The machine-learning model outperformed the current forecasting model by 10% to 30%, depending on the scenario, the researchers found. The AI-based model also doubled potential financial savings compared with the Fire Behaviour Index.

An immediate limitation was the frequency with which the current model updated wildfire data compared to the new machine learning model. Current systems could only compute wildfire forecasts hourly and release a risk rating to the public only once a day. But the machine-learning system could update its information every 30 minutes, providing near-real-time insight.

“Wildfires don’t wait for the daily forecast. If fire weather conditions can change within hours, our warning systems need to move just as quickly,” lead author Alberto Ardid said in a Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha | University of Canterbury press release. We originally developed the model as a proof of concept in one region. However, in this new study, we tested it across multiple regions to see whether the approach works under different fire weather conditions.”

Click here to read the full research.

Wildland firefighters may soon get hazard pay during prescribed fires in the US

A 2012 prescribed burn in Ashland, Oregon

Federal officials are considering a rule change that would make wildland firefighters conducting prescribed fires eligible for hazardous duty pay.

The Office of Personnel Management recently posted the proposed rule on the Federal Register, which specified that prescribed burns conducted by General Schedule employees would trigger Hazardous Duty Pay, while Federal Wage System employees would get Environmental Differential Pay.

“The proposed new differentials would apply to GS and FWS employees participating as a member of a firefighting crew engaged in activities on the fireline directly involving the implementation and control of prescribed wildland fires,” the proposed rule said. “This rulemaking would authorize a 25 percent differential.”

Hazard pay has historically not been eligible for GS employees when the “hazard” in question has already been taken into account in the position’s description, like firefighters fighting wildfires, according to the Office. That largely changed for firefighters in 2021 when a special exemption was added, allowing wildland firefighters working on a wildfire’s fireline to receive hazard pay. The proposed rule change follows the same logic, allowing a GS or FWS employee working a prescribed fire’s fireline to receive hazard pay despite the classification of the employee’s position.

Previous research has shown that wildland firefighters conducting prescribed burns are often exposed to carbon monoxide, trace metals, and particulate matter at levels that exceeded the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health’s recommended exposure limit, which may cause both short-term and long-term negative health impacts. Some of the personal protective equipment that wildland firefighters use has been found to increase the risk of cancer, due to the equipment shedding carcinogenic compounds and harmful chemicals when exposed to high temperatures common on firelines.

Firefighter advocacy group Grassroots Wildland Firefighters has been pushing for the rule change since 2022 and said it was another success in the fight to adequately pay and protect the nation’s firefighters.

“We truly appreciate the agency staff and leadership who pushed to acknowledge that ‘good fire’ is still hazardous work,” the organization said in a social media post. “We still have a long way to go, but this is a big win for the boots on the ground.”

Members of the public are encouraged to submit comments on the proposed rule change through June 15. Click here to submit comments and read the full rule.

Is the US Forest Service’s reorganization a ‘dismantling’ or a needed shift? Experts weigh in on wildland fire’s impact

The United States Department of Agriculture’s recent announcement to make sweeping structural changes to the nation’s Forest Service has brought confusion and uncertainty countrywide, ahead of what’s expected to be a very active wildfire year.

Numerous former Forest Service staff and communities have since shared their views on the announcement across multiple platforms, with some claiming the move is an effort to put more power into the hands of states, and others saying it’s an attempt to “dismantle” the entire agency. The reaction triggered the USFS to create a section of its webpage addressing “myths and facts” about the reorganization.

Kelly Martin, a decades-long fire veteran in the Forest Service and National Park Service, was initially sympathetic to the USDA’s alleged goal of moving more federal resources and support to the state level. Officials plan to transition the Forest Service to a state-based model in the western half of the nation, while maintaining the Service’s historical regional approach in the East. Leadership’s stated reason behind the move was to strengthen local partnerships and simplify the chain of command.

Martin, who is also a former president of the International Association of Wildland Fire, said states have long played a critical role in allocating scarce forestry resources for fire preparedness and response, and, on its face, this reorganization would ease that burden.

PREVIOUS COVERAGE: Forest Service to undergo ‘sweeping restructuring,’ close all regional offices

“In an ideal world, the states and federal agencies would all be working with and talking to each other, but no one is compelling us to have to work together,” Martin said. “This idea of pushing decision-making down to a collaborative process between the state and federal government, to me, makes sense.”

For that state-federal collaboration to actually work in practice, however, Martin said Forest Service directors would need to be required to work with state-based land management agencies to align the highest-priority projects. Officials have so far made no mention of such a requirement as part of the reorganization. Martin also said that while resources for preparedness and response have surged over the past few years, projects focused on land management and hazardous fuel reduction, which are critical to preventing future catastrophic wildfires, haven’t had nearly the same momentum, and nothing mentioned in the reorganization so far has addressed that disparity.

Research into wildland fire is also at risk of being severely impacted by the reorganization. Officials will close 57 of the Service’s 77 research stations across the country and consolidate them into a centralized office in Colorado. Numerous stations are located in university laboratories or at experimental forests where researchers analyze environmental changes over long periods of time, including wildfire risks and impact.

That move appears at odds with the current administration’s stated goal to focus on state needs, since a hyperlocal understanding of an environment’s relationship to fire is critical for understanding wildfire risk and prevention, according to former Forest Service researcher and current Tall Timbers Director of Fire Research Morgan Varner.

“Anytime we retreat from places where there’s a lot of wildfire or a lot of prescribed fire, which this plan does, you’re compromising our ability to conduct really relevant research,” Varner said. “That boots-on-the-ground has always been a unique aspect of Forest Service R&D … Local researchers are members of those communities, they know the managers in that area, they understand the challenges of people there, and how wildfires affect the economy, the loss of that relationship is the real cost of this.”

Fire and Aviation Management Deputy Chief Sarah Fisher claimed multiple times that the Forest Service reorganization would have no impact on current wildland firefighting resources, specifying that the current Geographic Area Coordination Center (GACC) structure and reporting coordination with the National Interagency Fire Center would continue.

The loss of research that supports fire prevention and response appears to contradict Fisher’s claim.

“When USDA moved key offices to Kansas City during the first Trump administration, that 80% of their staff either retired, resigned or changed jobs,” Varner said. “That’s the hidden cost of the lab closures … When you try to move people around, many of them are just not going to go.”

Martin acknowledged the risk of public lands being sold off but also said seeing such speculative risks is easy in any major reorganization. What’s harder is to steer the reorganization in a way that benefits forests and addresses long-held issues in the agency. The current unknowns make forming any conclusions near impossible, she said.

“It’d be a real tragedy and a real shame if a ‘dismantling’ came to be,” Martin said. “There’s a lot of trust that still needs to be rebuilt … and I think there are innovative and novel ways to address the problems that face our forests today.”

Europe’s 2025 wildfire season was its worst ever, by far

Wildfires burned over 2.7 million acres (1.1 million hectares) across the European Union in 2025, by far the highest burned area total recorded since record keeping began.

The EU’s Joint Research Centre recently released its 2025 analysis wildfires, which found the historic season started early in March, with over 379,000 acres (153,000 hectares) burning.

Intensity gradually increased between March and June before skyrocketing in August when megafires burned across several countries in the Mediterranean, driven by a record-breaking heatwave. Firefighters in Portugal and Spain fought 22 large fires that burnt 1.1 million acres (460,000 hectares), around 43% of the total burnt area across the EU.

The only countries among EU member states that didn’t experience wildfires were Malta and Luxembourg, according to the research centre.

An estimated 7,783 fires burned in the EU, which burned nearly double the average number of burned acres recorded between 2006 and 2024. All-time burned area records were broken in Germany, Spain, Cyprus and Slovakia.

“The 2025 season reflects a clear trend: an earlier start, more frequent and intense heat waves, and fires reaching higher latitudes than historically observed,” the centre’s report said.

Click here to read the full report.

Forest Service to undergo ‘sweeping restructuring,’ close all regional offices

The United States Department of Agriculture this week announced the nation’s Forest Service will soon go through massive changes, including the shift of its headquarters across the country.

The agency’s headquarters will move from Washington D.C. to Salt Lake City, Utah, according to a press release sent out on Tuesday. The agency will also close all of its regional offices, transitioning to a state-based organizational model, according to a USDA fact sheet.

The transition would affect 5,000 employees across the country, including the Service’s research stations, which will be consolidated into a single Research and Development organization headquartered in Colorado with multiple facility locations nationwide.

Department Secretary Brooke L. Rollins described the move as a “common sense” shift of the leadership closer to forests and communities. “Establishing a western headquarters in Salt Lake City and streamlining how the Forest Service is organized will position the Chief and operation leaders closer to the landscapes we manage and the people who depend on them.”

“What we’re doing in this reorganization is essentially flattening the organization,” Forest Service Associate Chief Chris French told the Hotshot Wake Up podcast. “This is stuff we heard clearly from governors, a number of other state agencies, federal agencies, state foresters, fire organizations … that when they worked with us, they didn’t want to work with eight different forest services, they wanted to work with one.”

Fire and Aviation Management Deputy Chief Sarah Fisher said on the podcast that the reorganization would not have an impact on the Service’s wildland fire program, saying no changes would be made to the firefighting workforce.

“There should not be expected changes for folks that are working on districts and forests,” Fisher said. “None of this work being done is impactful to the districts and forest facilities, and at this time, there are no intended changes to the locations of the geographic area coordination centers.”

Fisher also said that the reorganization would be in line with how the Department of the Interior plans to structure the U.S. Wildland Fire Service, which currently remains unfunded by Congress.

PREVIOUS COVERAGE: US Wildland Fire Service launched, despite lack of funding and without majority of nation’s firefighting resources

Are you a current or previous member of the Forest Service with thoughts on the reorganization? Share your thoughts in the comment section below or privately by emailing editor@wildfiretoday.com.

It was big, but the Morrill Fire isn’t the largest wildfire in Nebraska’s history

Fire crews recently fully contained the Morrill Fire after it burned 642,029 acres, according to local managers.

Officials on Saturday transferred command of the fire to local departments after containing the fire on Tuesday, less than two weeks after the fire started. Crews patrolling the fire’s interior didn’t observe any fire activity, despite there being critical fire weather on Wednesday. Fire managers acknowledged that numerous patches of vegetation within the fire’s interior were unburned, and scattered flare-ups within the interior remained a possibility, but said preserving unburned grass and vegetation within the interior would be the highest priority for local fire officials.

The Morrill Fire was declared the “largest wildfire in state history” by Gov. Jim Pillen and other local officials after it burned 460,000 acres two days after it started. Numerous news outlets, including Wildfire Today, then amplified the claim, but historians are pushing back against it.

At least one much larger fire burned off a major section of Nebraska and the Great Plains in 1865, and it was deliberately set by the U.S. Army to drive Native Americans out of a valley outside present-day Omaha, according to the Nebraska State Historical Society. Gen. Robert E. Mitchell allegedly requested that every ranch and military outpost in the valley set the prairie on fire on Jan. 27.

The 1865 fire burned for three hundred miles soon after starting but then joined in a massive conflagration driven by strong winds, the Society said, referencing Eugene F. Ware’s 1911 book “The Indian War of 1864.” The fire was still burning three days later, with the flames reaching Kansas, Colorado, and the Texas Panhandle.

The entire section of Nebraska south of the Platte River and west of Fort Kearny was left blackened and desolate, driving away the wildlife that Native Americans relied on, according to the Society. Despite there being no official acreage reported, the multi-state burned area was much larger than the Morrill Fire’s footprint.

Click here to read more from the Nebraska State Historical Society.

When are wildfire evacuations most dangerous? Research finds leaving late risks lives

“Once you’re on the road, it may already be too late.”

The somber warning was recently given by researchers who analyzed hundreds of self-recorded videos from people evacuating from wildfires. They were studying driving behaviour during emergency evacuations to learn why and when people choose to evacuate and understand how those decisions put lives at risk.

The riskiest place to be during a wildfire is often on the road in a vehicle, according to the research in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction. Examples from Australia’s Black Saturday wildfires in 2009, where 35 of 173 of the fatalities occurred during evacuation, and other evacuation fatalities during the 2023 wildfire in Yellowknife, Canada, and the 2018 wildfire in Paradise, California, drove the researchers to try to figure out the common decisions made by people trying to escape.

Of the 116 bushfire-driving videos analyzed (plus 183 flood-driving videos) from You Tube, many people either evacuated late after realizing the situation was more dangerous than they first thought, or drove back to defend their property, the researchers said in an article published in The Conversation, which includes links to many of the videos.

“The clearest advice remains to avoid these situations altogether by evacuating early,” the researchers said in the article. “Ultimately, the safest option is to avoid hazardous driving wherever possible.”

The researchers found that the strongest motivator for when people decided to evacuate, whether late or early, was the presence of other vehicles on evacuation routes. The study reinforced the role of peer behavior in real-time decision-making, leading the researchers to recommend targeted public messaging that explicitly addresses social influence to guide safer decision-making, even when others are engaging in risky behavior.

In another recently published research report, the importance of leaving early rather than late was underscored. This study looked at how the assumptions of emergency managers could create overly optimist estimates of time needed to evacuate by road.

A doctoral dissertation from Arthur Rohaert at Lund University determined that people evacuating from fires drive slower and leave larger gaps between vehicles, signaling that evacuation time estimates may be overly optimistic if simulations don’t take these otherwise small habits into account. Rohaert analyzed traffic data from evacuations during California’s 2019 Kincade Fire and 2020 Glass Fire and used the findings to develop a more robust evacuation simulation framework taking the behavioral patterns of drivers into account.

“The findings challenge intuitive assumptions about evacuation planning, such as the notion that having more evacuation routes consistently improves outcomes,” Rohaert said in his paper. “While this may be known in traffic engineering, it might be less so in emergency management. The findings, therefore, emphasise the need for traffic simulation tools to assess the effectiveness of strategies.”

Read the full disseration here.

Fire burns down historic building at key fire research complex

A historic home at a world-leading fire research complex was consumed by a lightning fire on Tuesday and burnt to the ground.

The historic Beadel House, on the Tall Timbers Research Station and Land Conservancy complex near Tallahassee, Florida in the United States, was completely lost despite the efforts of the Tallahassee Fire Department. One firefighter was reportedly injured in the fire, according to station officials.

A severe storm caused a lightning strike on Beadel House, which contained many historical artefacts and four staff offices. Tall Timbers is a research, conservation and education organization focused on the role of fire and promoting prescribed burning.

The home was built in 1895 by Edward Beadel, a New York architect who frequented the area to hunt quail. The home’s second owner, Edward’s nephew Henry Beadel, was a naturalist who was one of the pioneers in popularizing the use of fire as a land management tool among European settlers of the U.S. Henry was also a noted nature photographer, and his photos were housed in the building.

Firefighters were able to remove a handful of artifacts before the home burned down, but the research station’s officials did not specify which artifacts were saved.

“If you would like to help Tall Timbers build back, online donations are open,” the research station posted on its website. “Your support will provide Tall Timbers with the funding to rebuild the facilities needed for our growing organization. For questions regarding giving please contact Development Director, Crystal Rice (850) 545-2162 or cdrice@talltimbers.org.”

The International Association of Wildland Fire’s 4th International Smoke Symposium, scheduled for March 23 – next week – at Tall Timbers, is in a different building and will continue as scheduled. The Association sent the following message to registered conference attendees:
 
This loss has shaken not only the Tall Timbers community, but the broader fire community as well. As we are gathering next week, we ask that you keep the Tall Timbers team in your thoughts as they navigate this difficult moment.
 
The event will continue as scheduled, and we appreciate your support, compassion, and solidarity during this time.