In a new analysis of data spanning more than three decades in the eastern United States published Monday, 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.
Read more at: University of Florida
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