Did We Make Wildfires Worse? The Unintended Consequences of Fire Suppression

Despite common belief, North American forests are actually burning less, not more, according to new data. A study published in Nature Communications suggests that this decline in fire activity may be contributing to more intense and severe wildfires.

“What we see in the record is that widespread wildfires were happening very frequently, about every 10 to 20 years in many areas,” said University of Arizona fire ecologist and professor Donald Falk, who co-authored the study with U of A alumni and with researchers from the USDA Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station. “We also know that, by and large, these fires were not the severe fires we’re seeing on television today. They were often mixed-severity and surface fires occurring over very large areas.”

With funding from the John Wesley Powell Center, an Earth science research initiative of the U.S. Geological Survey, ecologists sought to better understand how fires happened historically.