More than a million Joshua trees had burned when the 43,000-acre Dome Fire tore through in 2020, with many plants blackening in the flames. Yet despite these hopeful signs, the group knew that the Mojave Desert and its iconic Joshua trees were existentially threatened by increasing – and increasingly severe – wildfires. “It was like, okay, are we, I don’t know, five big fires away from destroying the majority of the Joshua trees? These factors have put them in danger of almost completely disappearing from their namesake Joshua Tree National Park, according to a 2019 study from UC Riverside. “There have been fires in the climate refugia, which are a really dense Joshua tree habitat, that have been really devastating to some of the established reproductive adult Joshua tree populations,” Weltman-Fahs said.