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from the you're-not-being-the-person-smokey-bear-knows-you-can-be dept.
After analyzing two decades' worth of U.S. government agency wildfire records spanning 1992-2012, the researchers found that human-ignited wildfires accounted for 84 percent of all wildfires, tripling the length of the average fire season and accounting for nearly half of the total acreage burned.
The findings were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"There cannot be a fire without a spark," said Jennifer Balch, Director of CU Boulder's Earth Lab and an assistant professor in the Department of Geography and lead author of the new study. "Our results highlight the importance of considering where the ignitions that start wildfires come from, instead of focusing only on the fuel that carries fire or the weather that helps it spread. Thanks to people, the wildfire season is almost year-round."
The U.S. has experienced some of its largest wildfires on record over the past decade, especially in the western half of the country. The duration and intensity of future wildfire seasons is a point of national concern given the potentially severe impact on agriculture, ecosystems, recreation and other economic sectors, as well as the high cost of extinguishing blazes.
-- submitted from IRC
Jennifer K. Balch, Bethany A. Bradley, John T. Abatzoglou, R. Chelsea Nagy, Emily J. Fusco, Adam L. Mahood. Human-started wildfires expand the fire niche across the United States. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2017; 201617394 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1617394114
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday March 01 2017, @04:21PM
I only hear two things about wildfires, aside from the dumb stuff like don't go starting them
1) Humans cause most of them (which makes this story sound "duh" but I suppose provable numbers beat "everyone knows")
2) Humans put wildfires out too often and too soon making for crazy undergrowth and some day the national parks will have a firestorm completely vaporizing them, so every year since 1980 or so I've heard that starting this year there's an entirely new policy of letting wild fires burn themselves out as long as they don't get ridiculous in order to prevent giant fires. Now that policy is more than two generations old they can stop describing it as new. Presumably it works, they're still doing it or so I hear.
Although they're never mentioned at the same time, I always thought those two features kinda worked together. Put the fires out too quickly, no problemo, humans will start more fires then. It kinda balances out.
A third thing which is very new like last five years, the DNR strongly encourages people to do controlled burns with the cooperation of the fire department to wipe out invasive species and the DNR (or some nebulous group) will give you free native plant seeds to plant after your controlled burn. My uncle used to do this, although perhaps illegally, decades ago. Thats one way to clear a stand of brush, thats for sure.