Wildfires In The U.S. Are Getting Bigger
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/wildfires-in-the-u-s-are-getting-bigger/"That dichotomy — fewer fires, more land ablaze — is in keeping with long-standing trends. Since 1985, the trend in the number of wildfires hasn’t changed much, but the trend for total acreage burned has gone up and up and up. So what gives? Experts say there’s no single cause in the midst of all that smoke. Instead, the trend is probably related to the interaction of changing climate, short-term weather patterns and a philosophical shift in how we manage both forests and fires."
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"Fire managers began to change their philosophy and allow some fires to burn in a more natural way in the 1970s.... Over the last 15 or 20 years, that’s become more of the norm. In the past, every little fire that started got put out before it burned much land. Today, one fire might be allowed to eat up much more built-up kindling... It’s better to let the fire burn more acreage than risk lives unnecessarily.
But transitioning to a more natural sort of fire management isn’t necessarily going to return the forests to a past state of balance with the blaze, Collins warned. Decades of extreme fire prevention have altered forest adaptation. Areas that burn severely today might never grow back the same way. “You can’t just turn the switch back on,” he said. “We might be turning [some forests] into shrublands.”
