‘Lifeboats’ Amid the World’s Wildfires

Fire refugia

“Those trees are lifeboats,” said Meg Krawchuk, a fire ecologist at Oregon State University. Writing recently in the journal BioScience, Dr. Krawchuk and her colleagues argued that it’s urgent to better understand fire refugia, because they may be seriously threatened in future decades by climate change. Without them, many species may become threatened and the surrounding ecosystems may take longer to recover from wildfires.