What many may not know about the fires that occur near Los Angeles is that it’s located in the middle of a chaparral shrubland, a type of ecosystem that grows up around rocky Mediterranean-type ...

and senator on chaparral’s relationship to fire and the areas where human dwellings blend into wild, fire-prone habitat to find out whether or not its worth vindicating the shrublands.

Rep. George Whitesides joined Rep. Dave Min to introduce the Building Resiliency and Understanding of Shrublands to Halt ...

Where the fire started in Pacific Palisades, for example, is chaparral vegetation. It’s a shrubland vegetation. We have good evidence that this vegetation has evolved along with fire for at ...

But seawater also has downsides. Saltwater corrodes firefighting equipment and may harm ecosystems, especially those like the chaparral shrublands around Los Angeles that aren't normally exposed ...

Many of the locations where extreme fires have burned are in what's known as the "wildland urban interface," where development abuts forests or chaparral shrublands. But MacDonald noted that ...

Not all fire is good for native plants, notes Jon Keeley, an ecologist and researcher with the USGS that studies fire intervals in the California shrubland known as the chaparral. Wildfires ...

Of the homes destroyed in wildfires across the contiguous United States from 1990 to 2020, 64 percent — nearly 11,000 — were razed by grassland and shrubland fires, researchers report in the ...

THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Firefighters battling the deadly wildfires that raced through the Los Angeles area in January 2025 have been ...