Location: Argentina, Río Negro Province, El Bolsón.
Credit: Pablo Alcorta Briganti
Initiative: Belmont Forum CRAs (ALP 2026)
Project: Ngen Mawida
Story: Next fire in the making. Introduced to Patagonia for commercial purposes, fire-adapted Pinus radiata has become highly invasive. Its reproductive strategy has a synergistic effect with wildfires, with a higher seedling count after each successive event, reaching half a million per hectare. When individuals grow at this density, a partial thinning occurs leaving great volumes of continuous, highly flammable, partially dead biomass, that in turn increase the probability of the next fire.
Science is working to understand this phenomenon in order to find solutions, while the community is organizing to take action against a rapidly escalating problem.
The change in the fire regime in northwestern Patagonia involves multiple factors that need to be addressed from a comprehensive perspective.