Computer modeling puts a new species on the menu of edible fire breaks.
By Madeline Bodin
A team of scientists says it has found a plant that could help protect communities against wildfire while providing income and filling bellies at the same time: the banana.
A new study, recently published in the science journal PNAS Nexus, used complex computer modeling to show that in Southern California, raising bananas in fields at least 2,000 feet wide could both slow fire within the wildland?urban interface (WUI) and potentially be profitable. It?s a finding that could be applied to other U.S. locations, including Hawai?i, where wildfires largely destroyed the town of Lahaina last year. A computer simulation showed that a banana buffer of that size would have slowed California?s 2017 Tubbs Fire by more than five hours, long enough for firefighters to intervene. ?It turns out that this plant you would think is a specialist can do more things than we thought,? says one of the researchers, Michael Kantar, an associate professor in the tropical plant and soil sciences department at the University of Hawai?i at M?noa. Not only do banana plants retain a lot of moisture (even their dead leaves are moist relative to other plants), making the plant an effective fire break, but a banana buffer with an average yield could produce fruit sale profits of $56,000 per hectare (or $22,663 per acre), according to the study. ?It?s fun when science provides new answers,? Kantar says.
Banana plants, s...