Smoke from Southern California wildfires billows over the Pacific Ocean.

Credit: Courtesy of MODIS Rapid Response Project at NASA/gsfc.

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Teleconference on fire and Earth systems with Dr. David Bowman, University of Tasmania, Dr. Thomas Swetnam, University of Arizona, Dr. Jennifer Balch, National Center for Ecological Analysis + Synthesis, and Dr. Henry Gholz, National Science Foundation.

Credit: National Science Foundation

The researchers' findings appear in the April 24, 2009, issue of Science.

Credit: Copyright AAAS 2009

A pine forest in Siberia burns. This fire was ignited as an experiment in 1994 to measure the emissions and ecological effects of high severity burns. Increased warming during recent decades has been accompanied by increasing numbers of enormous wildfires, which have burned millions of hectares in Siberian and Canadian forests.

Credit: Tom Swetnam, Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, University of Arizona

This wildfire burned 28,000 acres of ponderosa pine forest in central Arizona and killed six firefighters. Increasing numbers of large wildfires and their costs, both human and natural, underscores the need to better understand their causes and consequences.

Credit: Tom Swetname, Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, University of Arizona

David Bowman of the University of Tasmania and Jennifer Balch of the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis of the University of California at Santa Barbara. Bowman and Jennifer led a large research time that synthesized many studies to produce "Fire in Earth Systems."

Credit: Randall Lamb, University of California at Santa Barbara, courtesy of Kavli Institute for Theoretical Phyiscs.