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Karen Short, a research ecologist with the Forest Service who contributed to the study and maintains a historical database of wildfire reports, says understanding why they are necessary to prevent them and educate the public is essential. Strategic prevention seems to work: According to the National Fire Protection Association, house fires are on the decline in the United States About half since the 1980s.
In 2024, Brief expanded its wildfire archive to include more information useful to investigators, such as weather, elevation, population density and fire timing. “We need to capture those things in data to track them over time. We still track things from the 1900s,” he said.
In summary, wildfire trends across the western United States have shifted to human activity. In recent decades, ignitions from power lines, fireworks, and fireworks have become more common, as opposed to railroad- and sawmill-fueled fires that were once more common.
The study found that vehicles and equipment are likely the number one culprit, possibly causing 21 percent of fires without a known cause since 1992. last fall, Airport fire There was just one such event in California, burning more than 23,000 acres. And cumulative fires are the result of arson and accidental ignitions — from smoking, gunfire, or campfires — which account for another 18 percent. In 2017, the party lit up an Arizona couple’s choice of a blue smoke-spewing firework to reveal a baby’s gender. sawmill fireTorching close to 47,000 acres.
However, these results are not definitive. The machine-learning models used for the study are trained to predict the probability of a given fire cause, rather than proving that a specific ignition has occurred. Although the study’s model showed 90 percent accuracy in selecting lightning or human activity as the ignition source when tested on fires with known causes, it got it exactly half the time, making it more difficult to determine which of the 11 possible human behaviors was to blame. .
Yavar Pourmohamad, a data science PhD researcher at Boise State University who led the study, said knowing the potential causes of fires could help authorities warn people in high-risk areas before a blaze starts. “This can give people an indication of what’s most important to be careful about,” he said. “Perhaps in the future, AI may become a reliable tool for real-world operations.”
Pormohamad and Short’s research is important for understanding how risks are changing, USC professor Sinolakis said. He advocated proactive measures such as burying power lines underground where they could not be buffeted by wind.
A 2018 study It found that fires set by downed power lines — such as the camp fire in Paradise, California, the same year — were on the rise. Although the authors note that power lines do not account for many fires, they are associated with larger swaths of burned land.
“We really need to make sure our communities are more resilient to climate change,” Sinolakis said. “As we’re seeing with extreme conditions in Los Angeles, fire suppression alone doesn’t do it.”
