In his story, “How mushrooms can prevent megafires,” Stephen Rober Miller describes how thinning forests to prevent fires produces a lot of sticks and other debris, which in turn produces a fire risk. So scientists are using fungi to turn those trimmings into soil.

Our media partner for the story, Washington Post, included it in their weekly edition of Washington Post’s Most Read list. They also syndicated it to both MSN and The Seattle Times.

The piece was also shared to the iNaturalist Community Forum and The Smokey Wire blog (run by Sharon Friedman, former Chair of both the Forest Policy Committee and Forest Science and Technology Board at the Society of American Foresters).

And though not a direct republication of our story, The Times published a piece after us that included a profile on Zach Hedstrom, who was featured in FERN’s story.

On Twitter, the story was engaged with by Sharon Sand (CA Public Grants Program Sr. Manager of Trust for Public Land, Jad Daley (CEO of nonprofit American Forests, 6.3K followers), US Nature for Climate (12.1K followers), Sustainable Urban Forests Coalition (1.1K followers), Go Nature Forward (DC-based environmental org, 3K followers), Amy Hanauer (The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, 3.5K followers), Green News Report (news aggregation, 3.7K followers), José González (founder of Latino Outdoors, 4.7K followers), and Miranda Veracruz de la Jolla Cardinal (WBHZ Channel 83 in Chicago, 10K followers).

On Instagram, the story was engaged with by Mission Climate Sustainability (enviro org, 1.5K followers), Society of Environmental Journalists (1.9K followers), and Aliya Jasmine (enviro journalist, 37K followers).

Washington Post sees around 150 million pageviews a month. In addition, their combined social media audience is about 40 million.