Murphy Woodhouse
Mountain West News Bureau Boise ReporterHey everyone! I’m Murphy Woodhouse, Boise State Public Radio’s Mountain West News Bureau reporter.
I grew up in Pocatello, got my undergraduate journalism degree at the University of Montana and now I’m back home in the West after a long stretch on both sides of the Arizona-Sonora border. Most recently I was at the Phoenix NPR affiliate KJZZ’s office in Hermosillo, the capital of Sonora, Mexico, where I reported for nearly five years.
Outside of work, I’m learning to be a good uncle and looking forward to getting to know every piece of singletrack near Boise. Trail tips? Story tips? Know a secret the public ought to hear? Drop me a line! Si prefiere hablar en español, ¡no se preocupe!
-
The Biden administration has put out a beta version of what it calls the American Conservation and Stewardship Atlas, a massive mapping project that seeks to visualize conservation efforts across the country. It also is intended to show progress toward the administration’s goal of conserving or restoring 30% of American territory by 2030. -
The agency says the new rule puts conservation on equal footing with other uses of public lands, like ranching and mining. -
U.S. federal agencies and sovereign tribal agencies often work together on shared goals like managing wildfire, improving wildlife habitat and other issues. A new repository collects a number of these co-stewardship - or sovereign-to-sovereign - agreements in an effort to help tribes and others better understand their possible uses. -
A new paper finds that current wildfire suppression policies can increase fire severity as much as decades of fuel accumulation and climate change. Using fire models, the area burned annually grew much faster under current suppression policy when compared to a policy of allowing low- and moderate-intensity blazes to burn. -
The National Firefighter Registry is perhaps the most ambitious effort to better understand the link between firefighting and cancer.
-
Across the region, goatheads - or puncturevine - are a scourge to cyclists, walkers and our four-legged friends: they pop tires and embed themselves in shoes and sensitive paws. There are many efforts to halt their spread, and new research could help to better target that work. -
Prescribed fires and mechanical thinning efforts are increasingly common land management tools intended to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire. But research into their long term effectiveness is somewhat limited. A recent study looked at the effects of such interventions over more than 20 years on a dry, low-elevation research forest in Montana, and found that the combination of thinning and burning was the most likely to reduce fire risk. -
A recent paper explored the challenges exacerbated by climate change faced by Latino farmworkers in Idaho, which are comparable to the issues faced by such workers across the West. -
Weather is one of the most important and dynamic factors at play on wildfires, and it is the job of incident meteorologists to provide up to date forecasts so that the crews and managers can stay safe and accomplish their management goals. This week these meteorologists and trainees from across the country are in Boise for a weeklong training to get ready for the upcoming season, which is already off to a rollicking start with the grass fires in Texas. -
As the name suggests, public lands are everybody’s. But that doesn’t mean that all people feel equally welcome. The Big Gal Backpackers of Boise are one of many groups across the West working to make public land more inviting to people who haven’t always felt welcome.
