Drylands

by Andrew Edwards, Christine Schlesinger, Ellen Ryan-Colton, Greg Barber and Peter Jacklyn, The Conversation Credit: CC0 Public Domain As the semi-arid Pilliga Scrub burns in New South Wales, many of us are thinking about fire once again. It's an El Niño summer in the hottest year on record. And there's a remarkable amount of grass drying out and ready to burn.…

In a NASA-led study, scientists mapped almost 10 billion individual trees in semi-arid regions of Africa, such as the one shown here. Credit: Courtesy of Martin Brandt, University of Copenhagen, DenmarkUsing commercial, high-resolution satellite images and artificial intelligence, an international team including <span class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>NASA</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>Established in 1958, the National…