I explore the impact of wildfires on Hawaii’s coral reefs

“In August 2023, a wildfire devastated the coastal town of Lahaina on the Hawaiian island of Maui. Within days, the University of Hawaii at Manoa began setting up a response group to focus on the fire’s impacts on water quality and contaminants. I led the work related to coastal water quality, because I am from Maui and was already working with the island’s community to understand the stresses that can affect coral-reef health.

We formed a team and started to work out what we needed to begin sampling, and what we needed to worry about, because we hadn’t previously experienced an urban wildfire next to a reef.

Our team sampled at various sites across the coastline — including nine within the burn-zone area — focusing on everything that we thought might stress the ocean that could result from an urban fire. We looked at carbonate chemistry, nutrients, organic contaminants and microorganisms.

In this photo, I’m checking one of our sensing stations. The cage holds a sophisticated electronic sensor that measures the water’s temperature, salinity and pressure, as well as its oxygen, pH and chlorophyll levels and turbidity, or clarity, every 10 seconds for months and months.

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Nature 637, 1014 (2025)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-00076-5

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This story originally appeared on: Nature - Author:Bianca Nogrady