Megafire: An ambiguous and emotive term best avoided by science

This study found that ‘megafire’ originated in the popular news media over 20 years before it appeared in science. Megafire is used in a diversity of languages, considers landscape fires as well as urban fires, and has a variety of meanings in addition to size. What constitutes ‘mega’ is relative and highly context-dependent in space and time, given variation in landscape, climate, and anthropogenic controls, and as revealed in examples from the Netherlands, Portugal and the Global Fire Atlas. Moreover, fire size does not equate to fire impact.