a 4,300-foot peak outside Prášily, a Czech vil-
lage near the border with Germany. I huffed to
keep pace with Petr Kahuda, a ranger at Šumava
National Park, and Zdeněk Patočka, a forest sci-
entist at Mendel University. The tower was built
in the 1960s to listen in on NATO radio transmis-
sions, but after the Iron Curtain fell, the Czech
government opened it and this 170,000-acre park
to the world. At the top, a circular balcony over-
looks rolling forests that once fueled the region’s
glass industry. Now, huge portions of its trees are
dying, victims of bark beetle attacks.
In 2018 central Europe experienced its worst
drought in five centuries. Summer temperatures
hit nearly six degrees Fahrenheit above average.
Tree deaths skyrocketed, and weakened survi-
vors attracted beetles. Worst hit was Czechia.
Loggers raced to salvage what they could. People
were so desperate, Kahuda said, that one man
offered Šumava National Park his sheep, hoping
their smell might drive away the insects.
In Germany, 750,000 acres of forest died from
2018 to 2020. No one knew quite how to respond.
History aggravated the crisis: Almost no native
forests remain in central Europe. Humans have
thoroughly transformed the landscape. Origi-
nally dominated by beech and oak, many for-
ests had been replanted with Norway spruce and
pine. After World War II, clear-cuts were made
to ship timber and pay reparations to the Allies.
But while spruce grows naturally at higher,
cooler elevations, foresters also planted it down
low. It did fine there for 70 years. Then, says Hen-
rik Hartmann, a forest expert at the Max Planck
Institute for Biogeochemistry, “climate change
made this formerly suitable habitat inadequate.”
FOR A WHILE, Turner kept her faith in Yellow-
stone’s cycle of fire and rebirth. Trees die; it’s
part of the equation. But at a 2008 conference in
Jackson Hole, Wyoming, she was confronted with
the possibility that the equation had changed. A
colleague presented maps suggesting that Yellow-
stone in coming decades could see fire seasons
like 1988’s nearly every summer. That year “would
no longer be exceptional—and the exceptional
years would be out of control,” Turner recalls.
She didn’t buy it at first. For thousands of
years Yellowstone’s monster blazes had burned
erratically at different intensities, scorching
some spots and skipping others. The mosaic let
animals and trees recolonize easily. Her own
work, influenced by that long-ago chopper ride,
had thoroughly documented that pattern. But
what if the system no longer worked that way?
Turner started investigating. She learned that
baby pines grew poorly in hot, dry seasons. She’d
been taught that young lodgepoles were too green
to burn, but she found them supporting explo-
sive fires. She watched areas of the park burned
in 1988 catch fire again. She saw fires crashing
through before young trees produced mature
seed cones. Some burned so big and hot that
no seed trees survived to regrow the forest.
In five spots around Grand Teton and Yellow-
stone, Turner found forests coming back sparsely
or not at all. Climate change was reshaping some
of the most storied scenery. Simulating a future
in which we don’t curtail emissions, she caught
glimpses of some of her favorite places as her
children might one day see them: At Oxbow
Bend, where Mount Moran is reflected in the
Snake River, the thick stand of conifers could
be replaced by sagebrush, grasses, and aspens;
along Firehole Canyon Drive or the Madison
River, the pine forests could become meadows.
Turner had thought of Yellowstone as “the
most resilient place in the world.” Now her
research showed its forests transitioning to aFIRES ARE RESHAPING
STORIED SCENERY:
SOME FORESTS ARE
COMING BACK SPARSELY—
OR NOT AT ALL.new state. Other scientists were reaching sim-
ilar conclusions elsewhere. Camille Stevens-
Rumann, a forest ecologist at Colorado State
University, examined 1,485 sites from 52 fires
in Colorado, Idaho, Montana, and Washington.
The number of burned sites that didn’t recover
jumped from 19 percent before 2000 to 32 per-
cent in the years after. “And by ‘not recovering,’
I mean not a single tree—not one,” she says.
Not long ago, the U.S. Forest Service mostly66 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC