A new University of Utah study on the impact of wood burning stoves and fireplaces along Utah’s Wasatch Front proves that 20-year-old restrictions have had a tremendous impact on the state’s air quality. “This study is showing a reduction in the contributions of wood burning by a factor of four or five,” says University of […]

As wildfires burn across the western United States, people are asking why does the West burn so frequently? Was it like this in the past? To piece together ancient landscapes, paleoecologists act like biological sleuths by digging through layers of sediment in search of clues. Traditionally, they analyzed pollen grains to infer what types of […]

Diversity is strength, even among forests. In a paper published in Nature, researchers led by University of Utah biologist William Anderegg report that forests with trees that employ a high diversity of traits related to water use suffer less of an impact from drought. The results, which expand on previous work that looked at individual […]

Fire, a tool broadly used for cooking, constructing, hunting and even communicating, was arguably one of the earliest discoveries in human history. But when, how and why it came to be used is hotly debated among scientists. A new scenario crafted by University of Utah anthropologists proposes that human ancestors became dependent on fire as […]