On a crisp fall morning north of Reno, Nevada, scientists in bright yellow safety coats watched flames dance through a burning bush while three enormous drones hummed overhead, tracing the smoke plume. This wasn't a wildfire out of control — it was a carefully planned controlled burn, the first of many that researchers hope will reshape how we understand fire, recovery, and the landscape in between.
The project is called Harnessing the Data Revolution for Fire Science, and it brings together researchers from three Nevada institutions: the Desert Research Institute (DRI), the University of Nevada Reno (UNR), and the University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV). Around 30 scientists are working on site, moving in coordinated teams to monitor flames, adjust equipment, and take measurements against the clock, racing to finish burns before the wettest days of winter arrive.
The research site sits about 30 minutes north of Reno on land managed by the Bureau of Land Management. Researchers chose this spot because the plants growing there represent the full diversity of the Great Basin sagebrush ecosystem — a landscape that Nevada depends on but that faces enormous pressure from wildfires. Nevada ranks high among U.S. states at risk from large wildfires, thanks to its dry climate and the spread of invasive grasses that burn easily.
The burn area is confined inside a metal track about 100 meters long — roughly the length of a football field. At one end sits a strange-looking greenhouse mounted on wheels. This automated structure moves along the track 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for at least a year after the fires, sealing over individual research plots for about a minute at a time to measure how much water the plants release into the air and how much carbon the landscape absorbs. The idea is to capture how the ecosystem's metabolism changes as plants recover — whether sagebrush landscapes trap carbon or release it, both before and after burns.
Nic Beres, one of the project leads, explained why this matters. "Our sagebrush landscape sits at the intersection of high ecological importance and high wildfire risk, making this project very important both locally and regionally," she said.
What makes this project unusual is its scope. Most fire research focuses on a single moment — the blaze itself. This team treats wildfire as a continuous story, linking the landscape and climate conditions before the fire, the physical and chemical processes during the burn, and the way the ecosystem responds and recovers for months or years afterward. Those post-fire conditions, Beres noted, become the pre-fire conditions for the next fire, creating feedback loops that shape fire patterns across the Great Basin for generations.
The project was years in the making and faced an unexpected delay: the extended government shutdown in late 2025 forced researchers to cover the entire site with tarps to protect it from early rains that could have wet the vegetation and pushed the burns back even further.
By scaling what they learn from these controlled burns to larger wildfires, the researchers hope to give land and fire managers better tools to protect both ecosystems and communities across the American West.