This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: When forests burn, the direct consequences are obvious: houses go up in flames and habitats are destroyed. The damage caused by smoke extending far beyond the fire area is less visible.
Sarah Meier, an environmental economist at ETH Zurich, investigated this in relation to avian populations in the U.S. together with Eric Strobl from the University of Bern. The work is published in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management. The researchers factored in data from the North American Breeding Bird Survey, a long-term program that has monitored bird populations in North America since 1966.
Each year, trained volunteers count all the birds they see or hear along fixed routes, each about 40 kilometers (25 miles) long, at some 50 stops. Meier and Strobl analyzed data from around 2,800 such routes in the U.S. over a 15-year period, from 2008 to 2022, and combined it with high-resolution data on particulate matter pollution from wildfires. In addition to the number of species, they examined how evenly birds were distributed across different species and how much the species differed from one another in evolutionary terms.
The result: If an area had been more heavily affected by wildfire smoke the previous year, bird diversity there was lower in the following breeding season. If smoke levels rose from an average year to a significantly smokier one, the number of species dipped by around 3%. On an average survey route with 55 species, this equates to roughly one to two fewer species.
At the most heavily affected monitoring sites, however, the number of species fell much more sharply. "I wasn't sure whether we would see any effect at all across such a large and ecologically diverse area," Meier said. This makes it all the more remarkable that the correlation is evident across the U.S. as a whole.
"The effect isn't huge, but it is measurable. And we never know which species will disappear and which of these are particularly important for an ecosystem. Therefore, even a small decline can, in the worst-case scenario, cause an ecosystem to become unbalanced." Forest fires often occur during periods of heat and drought—conditions that can also have a direct impact on birds.
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