Emissions, Chemistry, and the Environmental Impacts of Wildland Fire
Citation:
Holder, A. AND A. Sullivan. Emissions, Chemistry, and the Environmental Impacts of Wildland Fire. ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY. American Chemical Society, Washington, DC, 58(34):14963-14967, (2024).
Impact/Purpose:
This commentary provides an overview of recent prominent wildland fire research published by ES&T, ES&T Air, and ES&T letters and introduces a collection of papers for a virtual issue on wildland fire environmental impacts.
Description:
Wildland fires pose an environmental challenge that hasbeen growing in recent years, as wildfires increase inmagnitude and the use of prescribed fire has expanded toreduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire. Fire is also usedthroughout the world for reducing agricultural waste andclearing land. Wildland fires are one of the largest sources ofpollutants to the global atmosphere with major impacts on airquality and climate. Fire also disturbs terrestrial and aquaticsystems and poses numerous environmental impacts in areasnear the fire and downwind ecosystems. With climate changeincreasingly driving higher fire activity, understanding theenvironmental impacts of wildland fires will continue tobecome more important.As the research community strives to understand the fullcomplexity of fire and its environmental impacts, the researchquestions continue to expand. To capture the latest scientificdevelopments in this area, the Environmental Science &Technology (ES&T) portfolio of journals (ES&T, ACS ES&TAir, and ES&T Letters) recently launched a new special issuecall for papers entitled “Wildland Fires: Chemistry, Contamination, Climate and Human Health”, with a submissiondeadline of September 2, 2024. To complement this, we havecollated previously published research on this topic fromES&T, ES&T Letters, and ACS ES&T Water from 2020 topresent as a virtual collection that highlights nascent wildfireresearch topics. The papers chosen are grouped by topic andintroduced below.