'It's gone': Conservation science in Thailand's burning forest April 4, 2025

Smoke from the wildfires and nearby agricultural burning causes heavy air pollution.

By AFP - Agence France Presse

'It's gone': Conservation science in Thailand's burning forest

by Sara HUSSEIN.

Scientist Inna Birchenko began to cry as she described the smoldering protected forest in Thailand where she was collecting samples from local trees shrouded in wildfire smoke.

"This beautiful, diverse community of trees and animals is being destroyed as you see it, as you watch it," she said.

Birchenko, a geneticist at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, was collecting seeds and leaves in Umphang Wildlife Sanctuary with colleagues from Britain and Thailand.

They will study how temperature and moisture affect germination and whether genetics dictate those responses.

That may one day help ensure that reforestation is done with trees that can withstand the hotter temperatures and drier conditions caused by climate change.

But in Umphang, a remote region in Thailand's northwest, the scientists confronted the toll that human activity and climate change are already having on forests that are supposed to be pristine and protected.

Birchenko and her colleagues hiked kilometer after kilometer through burned or still-smoldering forest, each footstep stirring up columns of black and gray ash.

They passed thick fallen trees that were smoking or even being licked by dancing flames and traversed stretches of farmland littered with corn husks, all within the sanctuary's boundaries.

The wildlife for which the sanctuary is famous—hornbills, deer, elephants, and even tigers—was nowhere to be seen.

Instead, there were traces of the fire's effect: a palm-sized cicada, its front neon yellow, its back end charred black; and the nest of a wild fowl, harboring five scorched eggs.

"My heart is broken," said Nattanit Yiamthaisong, a Ph.D. student at Chiang Mai University's Forest Restoration and Research Unit (FORRU) who is working with Birchenko and her Kew colleague Jan Sala.

"I expected a wildlife sanctuary or national park to be a protected area. I'm not expecting a lot of agricultural land like this, a lot of fire along the way."

Global threat of wildfires

The burning in Umphang Wildlife Sanctuary is hardly an outlier.

Wildfires are common in Thailand during the country's spring burning season when farmers set fields alight to prepare for new crops.

Some communities have permission to live and farm plots inside protected areas because of their long-standing presence on the land.

Traditionally, burning has helped farmers enrich the soil, and fire can be a natural part of a forest's ecosystem. Some seeds rely on fire to germinate.

But agricultural burning can quickly spread to adjacent forests—intentionally or by accident.

The risks are heightened by the drier conditions of climate change and growing economic pressure on farmers, who are keen to plant more frequently and across larger areas.

Experts warn that forests subjected to repeated, high-intensity fires have no chance to regenerate naturally, and may never recover.

Fire data based on satellite images compiled by US space agency NASA shows hotspots and active fires burning across many protected areas in Thailand over recent weeks.

Around tourist hotspot Chiang Mai, firefighting helicopters drop water on local wildfires, at a cost of thousands of dollars per mission.

But remote Umphang is far from the public eye.

Park rangers protect the area, but they are frequently underpaid, poorly resourced, and overstretched, local environmentalists say.

It's a long-standing problem in Thailand, whose Department of National Parks has sometimes closed protected areas in a bid to prevent fires from spreading. The department did not respond to AFP requests for comment.

And the challenge is hardly unique to Thailand. Devastating blazes have ravaged wealthy California, Japan, and South Korea in recent months.

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