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The Mendocino Complex fire burning in California on Aug. 5, 2018.

As fires burn across the West, especially in California, people are turning to Twitter to share photos, updates and family details. And this data can be harvested for even better purposes when you look at the hashtags people are using like #MendocinoComplexFire.

Now a few researchers at the U.S. Forest Service have pulled these details into a new project.

Using hashtags like #wildfire and #smoke and the top 15 most severe fires in the state of California, the researchers pulled together a surprisingly accurate picture of the fires and the area.

Research social scientist Sonya Sachdeva spoke with KJZZ's Marcus Charleston this morning about what they were able to glean from all these tweets.