December 18, 2023
Introduction:
Read more of the Eurekalert article here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1011311(Eurekalert) In a new analysis of data spanning more than three decades in the eastern United States, a team of scientists found a concerning trend – an increasing number of wildfires across a large swath of America.
“It’s a serious issue that people aren’t paying enough attention to: We have a rising incidence of wildfires across several regions of the U.S., not only in the West,” said Victoria Donovan, lead author of the study and an assistant professor of forest management at the UF/IFAS West Florida Research and Education Center. “We’re allocating the majority of resources to fire suppression in the western part of the country, but we have evidence that other areas are going to need resources, too.”
The team used data from the federal Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity Database from the years 1984 to 2020, the most recently available dataset at the time, to quantify the characteristics of large wildfires – each burning over 200 hectares, or 490 acres. This included identifying which regions during that period had the largest fires, most land burned and seasonality factors.
Their findings indicated increasing wildfire risk across the southern and eastern portions of what’s known as the Eastern Temperate Forests, an area that roughly bisects the country from Michigan in the north to the eastern half of Texas in the south.
“The eastern U.S. has the most expansive wildland-urban interface in the country and thus is at high risk from wildfire,” Donovan said. “The thought behind this research was that if there are signals that wildfires are increasing, we need to understand what those changes look like.”
To read the results of the study as presented in Geophysical Research Letters: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.co ... 3GL107051
