Wildfire scientists have unveiled a new rapid risk-assessment tool that shows substantial wildfire danger to homes and buildings in three major Arctic communities, revealing that between 14% and 26% of structures in Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Whitehorse face high or very high risk from approaching flames. The study, led by Jennifer I. Schmidt of the University of Alaska Anchorage together with Robert H. Ziel, Monika P. Calef, Anna Varvak, and Julio C. Postigo, was published in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Science. Rather than relying on complex fire-behavior simulations that demand specialist analysts and expensive software, the approach combines datasets that most local governments already possess: building footprints, zoning maps, and readily available vegetation layers. The result is an updatable, affordable portrait of which buildings face the greatest threat and where mitigation dollars can do the most good.
The urgency behind the work is hard to overstate. Wildfire costs and damages in the United States alone are now estimated at between USD 394 billion and 893 billion annually, and the 2019 to 2020 Australian fire disasters cost nearly USD 100 billion. The Arctic, often imagined as too cold and wet to burn, is not immune: since 1980, wildfires have cost Alaska between USD 2 billion and 5 billion, with projections suggesting costs could rise 68% by the end of the century. Canadian suppression expenses are expected to climb by 60 to 110% relative to the 1980 to 2009 baseline. Meanwhile, structure loss from wildfire has doubled over the past two decades in the western United States, and western Canada has suffered major structure-loss events in four of the last eight fire seasons. Nearly half the global population now lives within the wildland-urban interface, the zone where people and forests meet or intermingle, making tools that translate fire science into actionable local maps increasingly vital.
The researchers’ central premise is conceptually simple but technically consequential: for a structure to be at high risk, a flammable hazard must exist nearby, within roughly 500 meters, and the surrounding landscape must exhibit high wildfire exposure. The method begins with a flammability hazard layer at 30-meter resolution, built from a modified version of NASA’s ABoVE Landcover dataset in which generic evergreen classes were refined to reflect locally flammable species such as black spruce, white spruce, lodgepole pine, and subalpine fir, each assigned hazard ratings from 0 to 100. Critically, the team treated structures themselves as fuel. Each building contributes three fuel units to the surrounding flammability score, a value chosen after systematic testing of one through ten fuel units; three proved optimal, nudging densely built environments up a hazard category without causing wholesale reclassification. Structure density was computed at 90-meter resolution, multiplied by three, and added to the vegetation-based hazard to produce an enhanced flammability hazard layer.
Wildfire exposure, the second pillar of the assessment, captures the potential for hazard to travel. It is calculated as the average flammability hazard within a 100-meter or 500-meter radius, representing the likelihood that fire can reach and burn a given location even if the local fuels themselves are sparse. Exposure values, also ranging from 0 to 100, are classified into five tiers from very low to extreme, and concentrated pockets of flammable vegetation drive scores upward. The third ingredient is structure vulnerability, produced by multiplying the enhanced flammability hazard by a structure importance factor derived from zoning data: residential buildings and critical infrastructure such as hospitals, schools, and nursing homes receive the highest weight, followed by commercial and other structures. Where zoning was unavailable, as on military installations like Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage and Fort Wainwright and Eielson Air Force Base in Fairbanks, the team collaborated with base personnel or interpreted aerial imagery to classify neighborhoods. The final risk score synthesizes hazard, exposure, and vulnerability into six categories, from extremely low to very high.
The results paint a nuanced picture of Arctic fire danger. Fairbanks showed the greatest proportion of structures in the top two risk categories at 26%, followed by Whitehorse at 22% and Anchorage at 14%. Anchorage, paradoxically, had the highest share of buildings in the top vulnerability tiers, 42%, yet the lowest risk, a consequence of its large urban footprint where dense housing raises vulnerability but fragmented, less-flammable vegetation and abundant developed ground suppress exposure. Fairbanks and Whitehorse, with structures woven into spruce- and pine-dominated boreal landscapes, showed closer alignment between vulnerability and risk. Anchorage was also the only study area where more than 1% of cells jumped two or more flammability categories when buildings were counted as fuel, at 7%, reflecting its 27% share of structure area containing seven or more buildings per cell. The analysis also confirmed the primacy of exposure: when a structure’s wildfire exposure was extreme, at least 87% of such buildings landed in the highest risk category across all three communities.
A key innovation lies in how the team redrew the wildland-urban interface itself. Traditional WUI maps distinguish urban, interface, and intermix zones; the researchers added a fourth category, the transmission zone, marking areas roughly 2.4 kilometers beyond the WUI boundary where fire could move into a community and where fuel breaks might be sited. Within the 500-meter buffer around structures, urban areas were defined by exposure values of 20 or less, interface zones by 21 to 60, and intermix by values above 60, cross-referenced with Alaska and Yukon wildfire management designations that prioritize suppression from critical down to unplanned or wilderness levels. Fairbanks claimed the largest overall WUI footprint, and the transmission zone proved the largest category in every study area, spanning 23,347 square kilometers around Anchorage, 6,180 square kilometers around Fairbanks, and 665 square kilometers around Whitehorse. Across all sites, most structures fell within interface zones, 52 to 61%, followed by intermix at 20 to 35%. Thousands of buildings sit in the high-risk interface and intermix zones where mitigation should concentrate: 15,537 structures in Anchorage, 16,212 in Fairbanks, and 3,734 in Whitehorse.
The method faced its most demanding test against a real disaster. On 17 August 2019, during southcentral Alaska’s hottest and driest summer on record, the likely human-caused McKinley wildfire was driven by high winds across 13.3 square kilometers in three days, destroying 52 residential structures, 84 outbuildings, and three commercial buildings, affecting 1,028 properties and forcing roughly 350 to 400 people to evacuate. By comparing pre-fire aerial imagery from 2017 with post-fire imagery from 2020 at 0.3-meter resolution and linking vanished buildings to the Matanuska-Susitna Borough structure database, the team identified exactly which structures burned. The verdict was statistically compelling: burned structures had significantly higher wildfire exposure than those that survived, and the proportion of burned structures with exposure values above 60 was significantly larger than among unburned ones. Structure risk scores above 60 were also significantly associated with burning. Notably, the test held even under conditions so extreme that normally resistant, low-flammability fuels were igniting.
The study’s design was shaped by sustained community engagement. Through workshops in 2019, 2021, and 2023, along with 15 to 20 meetings organized by Anchorage community councils and landowner associations and public events ranging from wildfire awareness days to Arbor Day, residents and agency staff reshaped everything from color schemes to model parameters. One consequential example: Anchorage residents and fire managers insisted that the maps reflect the spruce beetle outbreak first detected in 2016 and peaking around 2020, which killed and removed many spruce trees. The team responded with rules derived from aerial detection surveys, reclassifying white spruce cells in areas of beetle intensity of 11% or greater to mixed forest, and shifting mixed forest cells to open shrub, while a succession model updated vegetation on areas burned within the last 30 years. This iterative dialogue ensured outputs that both wildfire practitioners and the general public can interpret, a prerequisite the authors see as central to building fire-adapted communities.
The practical implications for planning are direct. Because mitigation funding is often tied to officially designated WUI areas, the ability to rapidly recalculate boundaries from updated building layers expands funding opportunities and keeps pace with community growth. The framework also points to different interventions in different zones: structures in intermix areas, surrounded by vegetation, benefit most from fuel treatments, while those in interface zones, where flammable vegetation is scarcer, are better served by home hardening measures such as fire-resistant roofs, siding, decks, screens, and unburnable buffers. Given that wildfire activity tends to occur where exposure exceeds 60, the authors recommend concentrating resources on the top two risk categories. Where national products like wildfirerisk.org rely on generalized fuel layers that can overestimate unburnable area in WUI zones and are updated too slowly for annually burning landscapes, this approach trades complexity for transparency, using local data that governments already collect. The underlying wildfire exposure toolbox is publicly available on GitHub, and the team argues that empowered residents, equipped with accurate, current, neighborhood-scale information, are crucial to reducing wildfire risk, particularly where communities may prefer action without government intervention.
Article Title: Fueling Fire-Adapted Communities Through a Rapid Wildfire Structure Risk Assessment
Article References: Schmidt, J. I., Ziel, R. H., Calef, M. P., Varvak, A., & Postigo, J. C. (2026). Fueling Fire-Adapted Communities Through a Rapid Wildfire Structure Risk Assessment. International Journal of Disaster Risk Science, 17(2), 351-362. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13753-026-00716-y
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: 10.1007/s13753-026-00716-y
Keywords: Arctic, Wildfire, Risk assessment, Wildland-urban interface, WUI, Mitigation planning, Structures, Fire-adapted communities, Wildfire exposure, Flammability hazard, Alaska, Yukon
While astronomers are providing new knowledge of the stars daily, ancestral star knowledge is fading. For humans around the world, the stars were not mere objects of esoteric curiosity but guides to time and place that dictated the rhythm of life, and new research indicates that indigenous people in South Africa may be losing certain elements of that cosmic lore.
In a recent paper published in the Journal of Science Communication, South African researchers demonstrate that many of these old stories have disappeared from indigenous consciousness over the last century because of colonization and modernization in Africa.
Intriguingly, the investigation of ancient indigenous beliefs takes place against the backdrop of some of humanity’s most advanced scientific work exploring space today.
As humans moved from a roving hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a stationary way of life reliant on agriculture, they gained a new level of appreciation for the stars. Those glittering celestial objects always provided direction, but with a new focus on growing food, they now dictated when to begin planting.
When considered in this light, our present astronomy is just a continuation of the stargazing that predates the modern conception of science. The new work looks back on ten years of conversations between San indigenous knowledge holders and South African researcher Anton Binneman.
While Binneman was investigating traditional indigenous ways of knowing about the stars, South Africa was building the highly advanced MeerKAT and SKA-Mid telescopes, highlighting the dichotomy between the old and the new. His work was directly related to the telescope construction, as part of an environmental and social impact assessment required for such large-scale projects. Binneman found those beliefs were changing with time, as the modern world seeped into traditional lives.
“Stories are not frozen in time. Language evolves, the way people relate to the sky changes, and our knowledge of the universe changes too. Indigenous narratives also evolve together with the communities that tell them,” explained Binneman, a specialist in engagement, communication, and stakeholder management.
Rather than trying to uncover the original versions of the local lore, Binneman works in a Dialogical Knowledge Renewal Model, combining archives, community memory, and modern science into something with local meaning. The result informs local astronomy guides and astrotourism, connecting modern initiatives like SKA with the indigenous culture.
“It restores dignity to people,” Binneman concludes. “The first astronomers were not those who built MeerKAT or the SKA.”
At seven sites, Binneman interviewed 52 elders and knowledge holders from local Indigenous communities in a series of workshops. He focused on ethnoastronomical knowledge and how it changed over time.
In the workshops, Binneman showed participants images of celestial objects and asked what they saw and what knowledge they had of them. The researchers then compared these responses to stories recorded in the late nineteenth century, which now reside in the Bleek and Lloyd archive.
Over the course of a century, the indigenous understanding of the cosmos had changed considerably. Some stories loosely survived, while others appeared to have been completely erased from cultural memory.
“We could not simply use the archive as it was, partly because it is strongly shaped by the beliefs of the white researchers who created it at the time. Instead, it served as a starting point for dialogue with the communities,” Binneman explains.
The researchers discovered that the elements most relevant to modern life had the greatest staying power, such as Venus being known as The Farmer’s Clock because it marked the beginning and end of the workday.
The local people had once told a story of a girl who wanted to make light, so she threw a handful of ashes into the sky and commanded them to become the Milky Way. While the story of a girl throwing a cloud of dust is largely forgotten, the Milky Way is still called the Hemelstraat, meaning “road in the sky.”
“Older generations still remember these stories, whereas among younger people they are no longer part of living, practised knowledge,” Binneman said. “They continue to exist, but their form has adapted in response to colonialism, industrialisation and Westernisation.”
Preserving these stories in the public consciousness will now fall to local astronomy guides and the astrotourism industry, as they celebrate indigenous ways of knowing.
The paper, “San Ethnoastronomy and Cultural Memory: Reclaiming Indigenous Cosmologies in the Square Kilometre Array Construction Area,” appeared in the Journal of Science Communication on August 31, 2026.
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.
Named ‘GHOST’ the containerized infrastructure is designed to support orbital and suborbital launches
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Drones capable of spraying water and fire retardants have been practicing how to snuff out wildfires early in California and Alaska this summer—demonstrating a possible rapid-response tool for firefighting as climate change transforms wildfire season into a nearly year-round risk for much of the United States.
Most drones are significantly smaller than crewed aircraft and have shorter flight ranges, meaning they cannot replace large airtankers in delivering massive payloads of water or other fire-suppressing payloads to remote wildfires. But companies and fire agencies—along with organizers of the $11 million XPRIZE competition—are testing whether drones can help firefighting crews respond more quickly to small fires and put them out before they become more destructive.
The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, also known as CAL FIRE, ran its own field test involving five autonomous drones that worked together to deploy between 500 and 1,000 gallons of foam combined for suppressing fires on July 15, according to the TV station KPMH. The demonstration was organized with the help of the nonprofit FireWERX and the California-based company Seneca, which is making the drones commercially available starting in 2026.
© Seneca
© Christopher Miller for The New York Times
© Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters
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