Xiu Lin Gao
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xiulingao.bsky.social
Xiu Lin Gao
@xiulingao.bsky.social
Fire ecologist looking at climate, vegetation, fire feedbacks in the Earth system using field and modeling studies. Views my own.
Reposted by Xiu Lin Gao
Important new paper by Luke Collins and colleagues: "Extremely large fires shape fire severity patterns across the diverse forests of British Columbia [BC], Canada"

Key findings:
1. Fires in BC have increased in size from 1986-2021
2. Bigger fires have larger patches of high-severity fire

🧪🌍🔥
Extremely large fires shape fire severity patterns across the diverse forests of British Columbia, Canada
Warming and drying conditions are driving increases in wildfire size and annual area burned across the forests of British Columbia, Canada. The impact of increasing fire activity on these forests rem...
doi.org
August 19, 2025 at 5:59 PM
Reposted by Xiu Lin Gao
The PhUnFETTy lab will have four presentations at #ESA2025. These will cover plant ecophysiology, trait ecology, eutrophication, water availability, mycorrhizae, demography, theory, modeling, and more!

Check out the flyer and replies below for more details. Hope to see you in Baltimore!
August 11, 2025 at 1:16 PM
Led by Adam Hanbury-Brown, we found that Sierra Nevada dry conifer forests will become carbon sources and shift to oak-dominated forests under 2.5 °C warming by the late 21st century, regardless of management. Uncertainty remains due to limited data for constraining key model parameters is.gd/dm9aPu
Will thinning and fuel reduction treatments help dry conifer forests persist under climate change? - IOPscience
Will thinning and fuel reduction treatments help dry conifer forests persist under climate change?, Hanbury-Brown, Adam, Holm, Jennifer, Tortorelli, Claire, Young, Derek, Gao, Xiulin, Koven, Charlie, ...
is.gd
July 31, 2025 at 6:37 PM
Reposted by Xiu Lin Gao
We are collecting records of fire behaviour in the UK!

Do you have fire behaviour observations (recent or historical) for a specific location, date and time? We welcome you to fill in this survey to help us to validate and improve FireInSite fire behaviour predictions.

Survey link: arcg.is/CyqWj2
July 31, 2025 at 9:43 AM
Reposted by Xiu Lin Gao
Simulating Lightning‐Induced Tree Mortality in the Dynamic Global Vegetation Model LPJ‐GUESS

🔗 buff.ly/2DnFgZ0
July 18, 2025 at 4:59 PM
Just a reminder that you can still submit your abstract to our session by July 30th.
July 17, 2025 at 3:04 AM
Reposted by Xiu Lin Gao
🌳 🔥 🌎 Our new paper: The extreme fire-prone #weather underpinning some of the worst #wildfire episodes this century has become more than twice as likely due to #climate change—a trend now evident across much of the world's tropical and mid-latitude #forests.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Climate change has increased the odds of extreme regional forest fire years globally - Nature Communications
The authors show that extreme fire years in global forests align with rare fire weather extremes. Climate change has made such extremes 88-152% more probable. These findings highlight the need for act...
www.nature.com
July 11, 2025 at 8:54 AM
Reposted by Xiu Lin Gao
This week I participated in a workshop and was struck by the difference between younger male collegues who were speaking up like they were used to being listened to, and younger female collegues who were timid and not used to being listened to. Damn, are we still here…
July 11, 2025 at 7:51 AM
Reposted by Xiu Lin Gao
Another new paper published today using ECOSTRESS again to predict wildfire—this time burn severity—one week before occurrence across New Mexico. This paper also outlines a framework for using machine learning with these data and applications.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

@drwkid.bsky.social
Assessment of spatial autocorrelation and scalability in fine-scale wildfire random forest prediction models - Scientific Reports
Scientific Reports - Assessment of spatial autocorrelation and scalability in fine-scale wildfire random forest prediction models
www.nature.com
July 1, 2025 at 11:34 PM
If you are doing wildfire-relevant research, especially with the goals to understand the complex climate, vegetation, soil, fire, and human interactions in the Earth system, please consider submitting abstracts to our #AGU #fire session:
agu.confex.com/agu/agu25/pr...
<i>The Role of Fire in the Earth System: Understanding Drivers, Feedbacks, and Interactions with the Land, Atmosphere, and Society</i>
Anthropogenic and natural fires are an important component of the Earth system. Geographic location, fuel type, seasonality and intensity of fire largely determine the sign and magnitude of feedbacks ...
agu.confex.com
June 26, 2025 at 10:39 PM
Reposted by Xiu Lin Gao
Like I've said before, if you have any doubts about climate change, just go to a super-boring insurance conference and listen to the super-boring panels where they dryly talk about the growing threat of disasters so catastrophic and unpredictable in scope they simply cannot be insured at any price.
Wild how the Fed chair saying that *entire regions of the United States* won’t be able to get a mortgage in the next decade barely registered as a news event
June 18, 2025 at 9:44 PM
Reposted by Xiu Lin Gao
My first PhD paper is now published in #STOTEN! We used a long-term fire experiment and ecosystem monitoring protocol to quantify the effect of burning on the productivity, respiration and ecosystem #carbon balance of Cerrado #savanna (1/6)

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
The effect of fire on the carbon fluxes and productivity of Brazilian woodland savannas
The effects of altered fire regimes within open ecosystems are poorly understood and can have serious consequences on functioning and conservation acr…
www.sciencedirect.com
June 4, 2025 at 9:27 PM
Reposted by Xiu Lin Gao
New study by Wang, Braghiere (@renatobrgh.bsky.social‬‬) et al. shows how the use of #plant traits can improve modeling of global #carbon, #water, and #energy fluxes, and consequently lead to improved #climate projections. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Impacts of leaf traits on vegetation optical properties in Earth system modeling - Nature Communications
Earth system models often categorize plants to just a few functional types, and plant characteristics are defined per type, neglecting their diversity. The authors show how the use of plant traits can...
www.nature.com
June 2, 2025 at 12:43 PM
Reposted by Xiu Lin Gao
PSA that the FATESmodel can now in principle do grazing, thanks to @ckoven.bsky.social ‘s excellent efforts. People who measure the C,N or P efficiency of grazing animals, please do chime in if you can help us refine it!
February 24, 2025 at 8:41 AM
Reposted by Xiu Lin Gao
1/n
Please see our new paper in Nature Communications!

We used 1,851 tree-ring fire-scar sites and contemporary fire perimeters to quantify the prevalence of wildfire from 1600-1880 compared to 1984-2022. 🧪🌍🔥

Our key findings are as follows ...
A fire deficit persists across diverse North American forests despite recent increases in area burned - Nature Communications
Across many North American forests, recent years with exceptional area burned are not unprecedented when considering the multi-century perspective offered by fire-scarred trees. Nevertheless, abundant...
www.nature.com
February 10, 2025 at 3:12 PM
Reposted by Xiu Lin Gao
The most iconic figure in the environmental sciences is the Keeling Curve, the CO₂ record from Mauna Loa, Hawaii.

@noaa.gov had a wonderful site where you could visualize and download these data, and now it's just gone. These data belong to us and we should not let this happen!
February 5, 2025 at 11:38 AM
Reposted by Xiu Lin Gao
January 2025 was quite unexpectedly the warmest January on record at 1.75C above preindustrial, beating the prior record set in 2024.

This is despite the presence of La Niña conditions in the tropical Pacific, with the El Niño event of 2023/2024 long faded. www.theclimatebrink....
February 2, 2025 at 8:57 PM
Reposted by Xiu Lin Gao
Happy to share a new paper, "Effects of Hot Versus Dry Vapor Pressure Deficit on Ecosystem Carbon and Water Fluxes," led by the amazing Miriam Johnston w/ @mallorybarnes.bsky.social and others agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...
January 28, 2025 at 9:41 PM
Our @newphyt.bsky.social paper with @ckoven.bsky.social and others used a dynamic vegetation model to understand how grass allometry and phenology influence annual grassland matter and energy exchange and their seasonality, as well wildfire dynamics: nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/....
California annual grass phenology and allometry influence ecosystem dynamics and fire regime in a vegetation demography model
Grass-dominated ecosystems cover wide areas of the land surface yet have received far less attention from the Earth System Model (ESM) community. This limits model projections of ecosystem dynamics ...
nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
January 30, 2025 at 4:23 PM
Reposted by Xiu Lin Gao
We are looking for a grant-funded doctoral resarcher on a project focusing on how tree and shrub expansion into the tundra impact biodiversity and carbon balance @Department of Geosciences and Geography @helsinkiuni.bsky.social! DM me if you are interested, and please share!
January 28, 2025 at 10:58 AM
Reposted by Xiu Lin Gao
The California Fire Science Seminar Series will return on February 4, 2025, at 10 am PT. Join us for the weekly, virtual presentation and discussion on emerging fire science topics from a variety of speakers.
cafiresci.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?...
The 2025 California Fire Science Seminar Series — California Fire Science Consortium
The California Fire Science Seminar Series will return on February 4th, 2025. Join us every Tuesday through March 18th at 10 am PT for virtual presentations and discussions on emerging fire science to...
cafiresci.us2.list-manage.com
January 28, 2025 at 12:28 AM
at #AGU24 and interested in forest management using prescribed fire and how we can model that? come to my talk this Thu Dec. 12 at 8:50 am in room Salon C. I will be introducing a new management fire module in the dynamic vegetation model FATES.
December 10, 2024 at 7:02 PM
Reposted by Xiu Lin Gao
"So far, 13 models out of 134 ESMs participating in the recent Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, version 6 (CMIP6) have represented the coupling between permafrost, soil hydrology, and fires"

The IPCC prediction has a huge ensemble bias of the terrestrial carbon sink

#climate #uöäü1IPCC
Abrupt increase in Arctic-Subarctic wildfires caused by future permafrost thaw - Nature Communications
In a warming world, future rapid permafrost thawing can cause significant soil drying, surface warming, and atmospheric drying in the Arctic-Subarctic region, leading to an intensification of peat and...
www.nature.com
November 5, 2024 at 1:10 PM
Our work(with @dylanschwilk.bsky.social Robin Verble) found no fuel load or structure effects on post-fire mortality in eastern red cedar, suggesting Rx fire is efficient in containing woody plant encroachment into grasslands at early stage. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
No Field Evidence of Grass Fuel Structure effects on Postfire Tree Mortality in Juniperus virginiana
Prescribed fires are an important management tool for containing woody plant encroachment in rangeland ecosystems. Grasses are the dominant fuel type …
www.sciencedirect.com
August 23, 2024 at 8:39 PM
Explored Tahoe and had my very first horse ride. Prefer riding horse to work than driving now
May 28, 2024 at 5:53 PM