Over the last three decades, wildfires in the western United States have gotten bigger and more frequent, according to recent studies.
Summers ahead will likely bring more fires, even larger than those that have occurred the last two decades or so, according to a press release issued by the American Geophysical Union.
Research was conducted by Philip Dennison, a geographer at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, and colleagues.
Dennison's team analyzed every fire to occur within 1,000 acres from central Nebraska to the Cascades between 1984 and 2011. They examined approximately 7,000 fires in all, and determined the number of fires increased by seven every year over the last 28 years.
Those fires burned 90,000 more acres a year.
"Twenty eight years is a pretty short period of record, and yet we are seeing statistically significant trends in different wildfire variables-it is striking," said Max Moritz, a co-author of the study and a fire specialist at the University of California-Berkeley Cooperative Extension, according to the release.
The research counteracts the theory that the federal government has done a bad job managing national forests the last two decades.
Fires in all sorts of ecosystems increased, not just mountain forests where logging has been reduced, according to Dennison.
"There has been a lot of fire supression in the past in the mountains and there has been a build up of fuels. This build up could be leading to more fires and larger fires," said Dennison, who is also an associate professor of geography.
The hardest-hit locations according to the study were Sierra Nevada, Arizona-New Mexico Mountains, the deserts of the Southwest, Texas, Oklahoma, Kanas, eastern Colorado, and the Southern Plains, according to the release.
"But we are seeing a trend across the region. We are seeing it in deserts and grassland. The fact that we are seeing it in so many different ecosystems tells us something bigger is going on here," Dennison added.
Rising temperatures and increasing drought conditions have attributed to the increase in fires in the West.
Attempts to prevent fires over the last few decades have also contributed to the increase in wildfires as well, since "there's more fuel left to burn than naturally occurring fires would have left behind," according to the release.
"It could be that our past fire suppression has caught up with us," said Jeremy Littell of the U.S. Geological Survey on the AGU's website.
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