Compared to the 1980s, California condors are thriving, but their numbers are still struggling: Without human-reared additions, their population would be shrinking.
Lead is largely to blame, despite California's ban on lead-based ammo, a new study found.
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Checking in on each year's fire activity is important, but the findings need to be built into long-term records that can track how, and why, things are changing over time.
Big fires used to be (generally) considered the more damaging ones, and researchers and insurers tended to focus on those, said @pyrogeog.bsky.social. But as more fires tend to hit urban and populated places, like LA, that thinking is changing.
Rather than being shocking, though, researchers think the costs and damages from 2025's fire year are emblematic of the world's fire future.
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And 2025 was a somewhat contradictory year for carbon emissions, too. It saw the third-lowest annual CO2 emissions from fires since 2002.
But Canada had a third consecutive year of extreme burning in its high-latitude forests, which are important carbon stores.
The Los Angeles fires burned a small area. But it's densely populated and pricey, so costs — economic and otherwise — quickly spiraled.
Businesses closed. Neighborhoods were destroyed. Health care burdens rose. And hundreds of people died.
Those boreal forest fires, combined with emissions from 2023 and 2024, emitted more CO2 than all other North American boreal forest fires in the preceding 15 years, the study says.
So it's not just the size of the fire that matters for damage. It's what it burns, too.