State of wildfires 2023–24

Climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of wildfires globally, with significant impacts on society and the environment. However, our understanding of the global distribution of extreme fires remains skewed, primarily influenced by media coverage and regional research concentration. This inaugural State of Wildfires report systematically analyses fire activity worldwide, identifying extreme events from the March 2023–February 2024 fire season. We assess the causes, predictability, and attribution of these events to climate change and land use, and forecast future risks under different climate scenarios. During the 2023–24 fire season, 3.9 million km2 burned globally, slightly below the average of previous seasons, but fire carbon (C) emissions were 16 % above average, totaling 2.4 Pg C. This was driven by record emissions in Canadian boreal forests (over 9 times the average) and dampened by reduced activity in African savannahs. Notable events included record-breaking wildfire extent and emissions in Canada, the largest recorded wildfire in the European Union (Greece), drought-driven fires in western Amazonia and northern parts of South America, and deadly fires in Hawai’i (100 deaths) and Chile (131 deaths). Over 232,000 people were evacuated in Canada alone, highlighting the severity of human impact. Our analyses revealed that multiple drivers were needed to cause areas of extreme fire activity. In Canada and Greece a combination of high fire weather and an abundance of dry fuels increased the probability of fires by 4.5-fold and 1.9–4.1-fold, respectively, whereas fuel load and direct human suppression often modulated areas with anomalous burned area. The fire season in Canada was predictable three months in advance based on the fire weather index, whereas events in Greece and Amazonia had shorter predictability horizons. Formal attribution analyses indicated that the probability of extreme events has increased significantly due to anthropogenic climate change, with a 2.9–3.6-fold increase in likelihood of high fire weather in Canada and a 20.0–28.5-fold increase in Amazonia. By the end of the century, events of similar magnitude are projected to occur 2.22–9.58 times more frequently in Canada under high emission scenarios. Without mitigation, regions like Western Amazonia could see up to a 2.9-fold increase in extreme fire events. For the 2024–25 fire season, seasonal forecasts highlight moderate positive anomalies in fire weather for parts of western Canada and South America, but no clear signal for extreme anomalies is present in the forecast. This report represents our first annual effort to catalogue extreme wildfire events, explain their occurrence, and predict future risks. By consolidating state-of-the-art wildfire science and delivering key insights relevant to policymakers, disaster management services, firefighting agencies, and land managers, we aim to enhance society’s resilience to wildfires and promote advances in preparedness, mitigation, and adaptation

Use thermophysical property to quantify state of HIFU treatment for VLS

The aim of this study is to evaluate the performance of ADT methods in grading the effectiveness of HIFU treatment for VLS. High-intensity focused ultrasound has been identified as a promising treatment modality for vulvar lichen sclerosus, a common inflammatory disorder associated with an increased risk of developing vulvar carcinoma. With small probe on extensive VLS parts, the therapy was sometimes uneven, thus the total doses of HIFU machine couldn’t indicate the curative effect at each part. The current therapeutic effect was based on symptoms and skin appearance after 3 months, which was time-consuming. Until now, there has been no immediate quantitative assessment method of HIFU therapeutic response for VLS. In our study, active dynamic IR thermal (ADT) was scheduled to undergo HIFU therapy before and after treatment. The thermal time constant was calculated based on ADT images measured both before and after HIFU treatment. In the result of pig phantom measurements, with each part approximately the same thermal time constant before HIFU treatment, the change of thermal time constant was strictly positively associated with HIFU dose onto each part. This study demonstrates the clinical potential of ADT in fast and effective quantify state of HIFU treatment for VLS

Wildfire precursors show complementary predictability in different timescales

In most of the world, conditions conducive to wildfires are becoming more prevalent. Net carbon emissions from wildfires contribute to a positive climate feedback that needs to be monitored, quantified, and predicted. Here we use a causal inference approach to evaluate the influence of top-down weather and bottom-up fuel precursors on wildfires. The top-down dominance on wildfires is more widespread than bottom-up dominance, accounting for 73.3% and 26.7% of regions, respectively. The top-down precursors dominate in the tropical rainforests, mid-latitudes, and eastern Siberian boreal forests. The bottom-up precursors dominate in North American and European boreal forests, and African and Australian savannahs. Our study identifies areas where wildfires are governed by fuel conditions and hence where fuel management practices may be more effective. Moreover, our study also highlights that top-down and bottom-up precursors show complementary wildfire predictability across timescales. Seasonal or interannual predictions are feasible in regions where bottom-up precursors dominate.</p

Gankyrin-mediated interaction between cancer cells and tumor-associated macrophages facilitates prostate cancer progression and androgen deprivation therapy resistance

ABSTRACTIncreasing evidence reveals that the interaction between tumor cells and tumor-associated macrophages (TAMs) facilitates the progression of prostate cancer, but the related mechanisms remained unclear. This study determined how gankyrin, a component of the 19S regulatory complex of the 26S proteasome, regulates the progression and androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) resistance of prostate cancer through tumor cell–TAM interactions. In vitro functional experiments and in vivo subcutaneous tumor models were used to explore the biological role and molecular mechanisms of gankyrin in prostate cancer cell–TAM interactions. 234 prostate cancer patients were randomly divided into training and validation cohorts to examine the prognostic value of gankyrin through immunohistochemistry (IHC) and statistical analyses, and high gankyrin expression was correlated with poor prognosis. In addition, gankyrin facilitated the progression and ADT resistance of prostate cancer. Mechanistically, gankyrin recruited and upregulated non–POU-domain–containing octamer-binding protein (NONO) expression, resulting in increased androgen receptor (AR) expression. AR then bound to the high-mobility group box 1 (HMGB1) promoter to trigger HMGB1 transcription, expression, and secretion. Moreover, HMGB1 was found to promote the recruitment and activation of TAMs, which secrete IL-6 to reciprocally promote prostate cancer progression, ADT resistance and gankyrin expression via STAT3, resulting in formation of a gankyrin/NONO/AR/HMGB1/IL-6/STAT3 positive feedback loop. Furthermore, targeting the interaction between tumor cells and TAMs by blocking this loop inhibited ADT resistance in a tumor xenograft model. Taken together, the data show that gankyrin serves as a reliable prognostic indicator and therapeutic target for prostate cancer patients

Rising water-use efficiency in European grasslands is driven by increased primary production

International audienceWater-use efficiency is the amount of carbon assimilated per water used by an ecosystem and a key indicator of ecosystem functioning, but its variability in response to climate change and droughts is not thoroughly understood. Here, we investigated trends, drought response and drivers of three water-use efficiency indices from 1995–2018 in Europe with remote sensing data that considered long-term environmental effects. We show that inherent water-use efficiency decreased by −4.2% in Central Europe, exhibiting threatened ecosystem functioning. In European grasslands it increased by +24.2%, by regulated transpiration and increased carbon assimilation. Further, we highlight modulation of water-use efficiency drought response by hydro-climate and the importance of adaptive canopy conductance on ecosystem function. Our results imply that decoupling carbon assimilation from canopy conductance and efficient water management strategies could make the difference between threatened and well-coping ecosystems with ongoing climate change, and provide important insights for land surface model development

Inter-comparison of several soil moisture downscaling methods over the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, China

Microwave remote sensing is able to retrieve soil moisture (SM) at an adequate level of accuracy. However, these microwave remotely sensed SM products usually have a spatial resolution of tens of kilometers which cannot satisfy the requirements of fine to medium scale applications such as agricultural irrigation and local water resource management. Several SM downscaling methods have been proposed to solve this mismatch by downscaling the coarse-scale SM to fine-scale (several kilometers or hundreds of meters). Although studies have been conducted over different climatic zones and from different data sets with good results, there is still a lack of a comprehensive comparison and evaluation between them to guide the production of high-resolution and high-accuracy SM data. Therefore, in this study we compared several SM downscaling methods (from 0.25° to 0.01°) based on polynormal fitting, physical model, machine learning and geostatistics over the Qinghai-Tibet plateau where there is a wide range of climate conditions from four aspects, that is, comparison with the original microwave product, comparison with in situ measurements, inter-comparison based on three-cornered hat (TCH) method, and a spatial feasibility analysis. The comparison results show that the method based on a physical model, in this case the Disaggregation based on Physical And Theoretical scale Change (DisPATCh) method, has the highest ability on preserving the coarse-scale feature of original microwave SM product, while to some extent, this ability could be a disadvantage for improving the accuracy of the downscaling results. In addition, soil evaporation efficiency (SEE) alone is not sufficient to represent SM spatial patterns over complex land surface. Geostatistics based area-to-area regression Kriging (ATARK) introduces the highest uncertainty caused by the overcorrection during the residual interpolation process while this process can also improve correlation (R) and correct the bias as well as provide more feasible spatial patterns and details. Two machine learning methods, the random forest (RF) and Gaussian process regression (GPR) show high stability on all comparison results but provide smoother spatial patterns. The multivariate statistical regression (MSR) method performs worst due to the fact that its simple linear regression model could not meet the requirement of SM fitting on complicated land surface. Moreover, all five downscaling methods show a declining accuracy after downscaling. This phenomenon may be caused by the spatial mismatch on fine-scale. In addition, this could also be caused by the tendency that downscaled results will usually provide more spatial details from downscaling predictors, while they cannot capture the temporal changes of the microwave SM product well. In general, this phenomenon tends to be more significant over heterogeneous land surface. All in all, five widely used soil moisture downscaling methods were compared based on a comprehensive comparison scheme to add to the body of knowledge in applicability of downcaling methods under different weather conditions

Rebuilding a Microwave Soil Moisture Product Using Random Forest Adopting AMSR-E/AMSR2 Brightness Temperature and SMAP over the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau, China

Time series of soil moisture (SM) data in the Qinghai–Tibet plateau (QTP) covering a period longer than one decade are important for understanding the dynamics of land surface–atmosphere feedbacks in the global climate system. However, most existing SM products have a relatively short time series or show low performance over the challenging terrain of the QTP. In order to improve the spaceborne monitoring in this area, this study presents a random forest (RF) method to rebuild a high-accuracy SM product over the QTP from 19 June 2002 to 31 March 2015 by adopting the advanced microwave scanning radiometer for earth observing system (AMSR-E), and the advanced microwave scanning radiometer 2 (AMSR2), and tracking brightness temperatures with latitude and longitude using the International Geosphere–Biospheres Programme (IGBP) classification data, the digital elevation model (DEM) and the day of the year (DOY) as spatial predictors. Brightness temperature products (from frequencies 10.7 GHz, 18.7 GHz and 36.5 GHz) of AMSR2 were used to train the random forest model on two years of Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) SM data. The simulated SM values were compared with third year SMAP data and in situ stations. The results show that the RF model has high reliability as compared to SMAP, with a high correlation (R = 0.95) and low values of root mean square error (RMSE = 0.03 m3/m3) and mean absolute percent error (MAPE = 19%). Moreover, the random forest soil moisture (RFSM) results agree well with the data from five in situ networks, with mean values of R = 0.75, RMSE = 0.06 m3/m3, and bias = −0.03 m3/m3 over the whole year and R = 0.70, RMSE = 0.07 m3/m3, and bias = −0.05 m3/m3 during the unfrozen seasons. In order to test its performance throughout the whole region of QTP, the three-cornered hat (TCH) method based on removing common signals from observations and then calculating the uncertainties is applied. The results indicate that RFSM has the smallest relative error in 56% of the region, and it performs best relative to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS), and European Space Agency’s Climate Change Initiative (ESA CCI) project. The spatial distribution shows that RFSM has a similar spatial trend as GLDAS and ESA CCI, but RFSM exhibits a more distinct spatial distribution and responds to precipitation more effectively than GLDAS and ESA CCI. Moreover, a trend analysis shows that the temporal variation of RFSM agrees well with precipitation and LST (land surface temperature), with a dry trend in most regions of QTP and a wet trend in few north, southeast and southwest regions of QTP. In conclusion, a spatiotemporally continuous SM product with a high accuracy over the QTP was obtained