This thread - documenting the rapid growth of a new fire into Spokane, WA today - is terrifying. We’re used to wildfires in the Northwest but what’s happening right now in eastern Washington is not normal.

Spokane Rising@spokanerising.com · last wk.

Holy crap. Level 3 (GO NOW!) zone now includes urban Spokane, south of Francis to Wellesley. Level 2 (GET SET!) zone now extends east of Division. Not to be alarmist, but at this rate, it’s not inconceivable that the Old Trails Fire merges with the Fairview Fire.

There is a 20-megawatt data center proposed near the school of my ~2,300 population eastern Washington small town. We had restrictions on lawn watering last year due to drought...

For day two of #ESA2026 we're featuring "Zone Matcher: A climate-based web application for deployment and assisted migration of forest trees" 🧪 📊 Dataset on Dryad: bit.ly/4hzFrZC 📖 Article in "Ecosphere": bit.ly/4fzda2O #ecology @ecologicalsociety.bsky.social #forestry #climate #climatechange

New paper out in @pnas.org: this year’s western U.S. snow conditions were pretty dismal, but to what extent was this snow drought due to climate change?  Paper: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... (with Marianne Cowherd, Stefan Rahimi, Yuhong Ye) Thread:👇

Wildfire is once again making headlines across the western US and southern Europe. What have we learned from 20 years of the Fire and Fire Surrogates study? Explore this "Ecological Applications" Special Feature, spanning studies of the long-term impacts of forest management: tinyurl.com/46zt776y

✍ New blog post! You Can’t Compete With Someone Who Is Having Fun jenteottenburghs.wordpress.com/2026/06/28/y... This week, I published a paper on owl hybridization. This paper reminded me why I enjoy doing science in the first place: following my curiosity and having fun.

You Can’t Compete With Someone Who Is Having Fun

A reflection on enjoying your work.

jenteottenburghs.wordpress.com

New paper documenting impacts of drought on birds in the already arid SW US. 🦉🌐🌎 TLDR: It's not good. * Abundance declines in response to drought for most species * In this region drought-related declines in the south may be pushing ranges northward conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Long‐Term Drought Exposure Shapes Declines and Range Shifts in Aridland Birds

Climate change increases drought frequencies and intensities, posing risks to biodiversity. Species inhabiting arid regions may be vulnerable to drought because they live near their physiological lim...

conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

10 yrs after our first paper on spotted owls & “megafires”, here is the granddaddy of them all: a Wildlife Monograph. >30 yr of detection/non-detection data across >1500 territories (796 burned) and movement data from 171 GPS-tagged owls. Conclusion: big hot fire bad doi.org/10.1002/wmon...

TWS Journals

For the past few decades, northern and California spotted owls (SPOW) have declined across much of their range in response to habitat loss and fragmentation and have faced threats associated with the...

doi.org

A path forward? I hope so. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Fostering landscape resilience and species conservation in frequent fire landscapes

Restoration of dry forest landscapes of the Pacific Northwest often involves the removal of some closed-canopy forest that has expanded due to fire ex…

sciencedirect.com

I was extremely lucky to spend 4 summers working and conducting research at Teakettle. We had some close encounters with fires in the past, but it’s still rough after all the work that went into preventing a fire like this. Great NPR interview with @mhurteau.bsky.social www.npr.org/2026/05/04/n...

Trump administration falls behind on wildfire prevention with risky fire season ahead

Many of the nation's overgrown forests are at high risk of burning. Under the Trump administration, work to reduce flammable vegetation fell by more than a million acres compared to previous years.

npr.org

Alternative Future Vegetation Pathways Reveal Potential Transformations of Western US Ecosystems 🔗 buff.ly/1p4FMH4

This needs attention. Suzanne Simard threatened legal action against a journalist asking critical questions. This is not how science works. Brave of @aislingirwin.bsky.social to report.

@aislingirwin.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Journalists have in general failed to probe her scientific work. That is why she was astonished, and threatened legal action, when I asked her critical questions during an interview for this piece www.nature.com/articles/d41... @georgemonbiot.bsky.social

Check out this Lumbrazo (2026) paper. The study site is visible from my town. One of the lowest SWE on record in 2026. Builds on observations going back at least to Ziemer (1964) in the Sierra Nevada. Check out Wright and Agee (2004) for local fire history.

Sophie Gilbert@sophielgilbert.bsky.social · 5mo ago

New research 🚨: Forest thinning, when it opens gaps on north-facing slopes, can lead to greater snow retention. Nice work by Nature Conservancy scientists!

Saw this show last night. Thoroughly recommend. www.womenofamericanatour.com

Women of Americana

womenofamericanatour.com

Timeline cleanse: a Japanese photographer beloved by northern WA Indigenous ppl. “The story is not just about Frank and his charisma and his incredible body of work. It’s about the way people uphold his memory and still talk about him 112 years after his death.” www.hcn.org/issues/58-2/...

The little-known photographer who documented a changing Okanogan, Washington - High Country News

Beth Harrington’s 2025 documentary Our Mr. Matsura uses communally-held memory and traditional research to explore the little-known story of a Japanese photographer who documented the changing world o...

hcn.org

Field job in the beautiful mountains of NE Oregon doing passive acoustic monitoring and woodpecker demography just went live. Please share! jobs.rwfm.tamu.edu/view-job/?id...

Really proud of my paper with @ecologyofgavin.bsky.social, @grumpyunclesean.bsky.social, Andrew Stillman, and Courtney Davis out now in @natcomms.nature.com, which looks at the forecasted exposure of bird biodiversity to high severity fire in the western US. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Exposure of western United States bird communities to predicted high severity fire - Nature Communications

Changing fire regimes, leading to higher likelihood of high severity fire, are having unknown impacts on biodiversity. This study identifies regions of high avian biodiversity and individual bird spec...

nature.com

BREAKING | The Pentagon has suggested it would take over editorial content decision making for Stars and Stripes in a statement from the Defense Department’s top spokesman.

Pentagon says it will ‘refocus’ Stars and Stripes content

The Pentagon suggested it would take over editorial decision making for Stars and Stripes, which has long retained independence under a congressional mandate.

stripes.com

This is a MUST WATCH - you won't regret it. youtu.be/_FKcP8j010o

Former #Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura comments on the Minneapolis killing

YouTube video by Onest.

youtu.be

Thank you to the Yakima Herald-Republic for helping to spread the word on what community members can do to protect themselves and their loved ones from immigration raids and arrests.

Advocates respond to community fears as immigration arrests grow in Yakima area

Data shows that ICE arrested more than 950 people in Washington state between July 29 and Oct. 15 — far outpacing the roughly 1,000 arrests made over the previous seven

yakimaherald.com

New paper out in Science Advances today on A guide to assessing the impacts of climate change on landscape fire. There are thousands of papers on fire and climate change, and this paper discusses how fire, its drivers, and its impacts are modeled. www.science.org/doi/epdf/10....

The last of my dissertation work is in Ecosystems! Please reach out if I can share a PDF (or a story about trying to do field work during the two biggest California fire years on record 🥲)

Repeated High-severity Fire in the Sierra Nevada and Southern Cascades of California, United States: Landscape Trends and Belowground Effects - Ecosystems

Repeated high-severity fire is threatening forest resilience in dry and mesic forests of the Sierra Nevada and southern Cascades of California, USA. While impacts to plant communities have been descri...

link.springer.com

What do houses, energy, and sixty-pound salmon have in common? All of them are currently scarce but could be plentiful with the right changes to policy and practice. 🧪🐟🏘️🔋 How do we get to this "conservation abundance" future for nature and people? I have thoughts! www.perc.org/2025/12/09/t...

The Case for Conservation Abundance | PERC

How fixing America’s affordability crisis points toward a conservation future defined by plenty rather than scarcity

perc.org

🦉🔥🌲 New Paper 🌲🔥🦉 We used a novel dataset by Dr. Anu Kramer, bioregional passive acoustic monitoring, and Bayesian occupancy modeling to examine the relative effects of disturbances on the distribution spotted owls in the Sierra Nevada. Give her a read! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Fuels management mitigates megafires to the benefit of old forest species

Climate change and fire exclusion have changed disturbance regimes in forest ecosystems globally. In many seasonally dry forests, fuels management can…

sciencedirect.com

New paper by Garret Meigs and friends: "Big trees burning: Divergent wildfire effects on large trees in open- vs closed-canopy forests" From my read, one of the key take home messages is that dense forests, even if large trees are present, are still burning with a lot of high-severity effects🧪🌎🔥

Big trees burning: Divergent wildfire effects on large trees in open‐ vs. closed‐canopy forests

Wildfire activity has accelerated with climate change, sparking concerns about uncharacteristic impacts on mature and old-growth forests containing large trees. Recent assessments have documented fir...

doi.org

Extreme Heatwave Causes Immediate, Widespread Mortality of Forest Canopy Foliage, Highlighting Modes of Forest Sensitivity to Extreme Heat 🔗 buff.ly/CfdgwRy

great editorial on risk aversion in forest management particularly on proactive fire management vs reactive fire suppression. Equally relevant to southern Australia. esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Managing public lands requires a new kind of leader

Click on the article title to read more.

esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing: a 🧵 1/n Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

To learn more about the Cascadia Partner Forum and its work promoting coordinated transboundary conservation in the face of climate change:

Cascadia Partner Forum

cascadiapartnerforum.org

Installed sensors at Teakettle this weekend. I broke down 5 times. The District Ranger requested that I tell ‘the truth’ about the fire and the forest. Here you go…