Fire History
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The most destructive and deadly wildfires in US history were also fast. Using satellite data, we analyzed the daily growth rates of more than 60,000 fires from 2001 to 2020 across the contiguous US. Nearly half of the ecoregions experienced destructive fast fires that grew more than 1620 hectares in 1 day. These fires accounted for 78% of structures destroyed and 61% of suppression costs($18.9 billion). From 2001 to 2020, the average peak daily growth rate for these fires more than doubled (+249% relative to 2001) in the Western US. Nearly 3 million structures were within 4 kilometers of a fast fire during this period across the US. Given recent devastating wildfires, understanding fast fires is crucial for improving firefighting strategies and community preparedness
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On August 5, 1949, a fire was spotted at Mann Gulch, near Helena, Montana. The U.S. Forest Service dispatched a team of 15 smokejumpers, who were met by a fire guard from a nearby campground. When the fire blew up, thirteen firefighters were killed, three escaped. While the Forest Service studied what happened and revised its training and safety measures, few outside the agency remembered the tragedy. That is not until Norman Maclean published a meditation on it, entitled Young Men and Fire, did the event connect with national and cultural interests—and continues to thirty years later.
Fire historian Stephen Pyne and host Jamie Lewis discussed the fire on its 75th anniversary and how Maclean’s book has affected the American fire community.
Webinar recording.
The Oregon State University Extension Fire Program would like to take you on a journey of fire throughout Oregon. In this webinar, a team of regional fire specialists share diverse stories about how fire has shaped Oregon landscapes historically and currently. Understanding fire’s role in the place you live can help you become better prepared for fire and smoke, and more aware of your local ecological setting.
Webinar recording.
FRID statistics have been used for decades to help managers and scientists understand the ecological consequences of changing fire frequencies. The Forest Service Region 5 Ecology Program worked with UC-Davis to build a spatial FRID data layer that compiles information about fire return intervals for major vegetation types on the 18 National Forests in California and adjacent land jurisdictions. This data layer includes comparisons between pre-Euroamerican settlement (“pre-EAS”) and contemporary fire return intervals (FRIs). The FRID layer may be used for land and resource planning and assessment, as well as other natural resource applications such as fuels treatment planning, postfire restoration project design, management response to fire, assessing the effects of fire and fire regime change on ecosystems, and general ecological understanding of the historic and current occurrence of fire on the California National Forests and neighboring jurisdictions. This presentation focuses on the guts of the FRID data and the departure metrics, describes how to properly use the dataset, discusses some important caveats, outlines current updating and improvement work we are doing with the dataset, and describes a current national effort to develop a similar dataset and metrics for the US.
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Wildfires burned more area on non-forested lands than forested lands over the past 20 years. This was true for all land ownerships in CONUS and the western US. Burned area increased over the 20-year time period for both non-forest and forest. Across CONUS, annual area burned was higher on non-forest than forests for 14 of the past 21 years (Fig. 1), and total area burned was almost 3,000,000 ha more in non-forest than in forest. For the western US, total burned area was almost 1,500,000 ha more in non-forest than in forest. From a federal agency perspective, approximately 74% of the burned area on Department of the Interior (DOI) lands occurred in non-forest and 78% of the burned area on US Forest Service (FS) lands occurred in the forest.
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We use a unique dataset derived from contemporary (∼2016) remeasurement of 440 historical quadrats (∼4m2) in the central Sierra Nevada, California, in which overstory trees, tree regeneration, and microsite conditions were measured and mapped both before and after logging in 1928–1929. Pine relative abundance changed little with logging and declined to 5% of the contemporary regeneration layer. In contrast, the relative abundance of incense-cedar regeneration (32%) already outpaced its representation in the overstory (17% by basal area) before logging and proceeded to dominate the contemporary understory (49%). We did not find strong evidence for the positive influence of gaps on pine regeneration in any time period. However, across species, post-logging skid trails were positively associated with regeneration and woody debris was negatively associated with regeneration in at least one time period. We discovered that the occurrence of advance regeneration (regeneration that preceded and survived logging) best predicted new contemporary trees across all species. For shade-tolerant species, post-logging regeneration that established up to ten years after logging was also associated with new contemporary trees. In contrast, the few pine that transitioned into the contemporary canopy during the study period all established prior to logging. Our work provides evidence that low pine abundance in the regeneration layer as early as 1928 contributed to low rates of pine in the overstory in 2016, showcasing that the decline of pine likely began before logging and official federal fire suppression policies. We suggest that fire exclusion before logging perpetuated shifts towards shade-tolerant and fire-intolerant species in the regeneration layer that were early and lasting.
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Presenter: Douglas J. Shinneman, Research Ecologist, USGS Forest and Rangeland Ecosystem Science Center
Description: Accurately assessing recent and historical wildfire activity is critical for numerous agencies who manage fire-prone landscapes. The Wildland Fire Trends Tool (WFTT) is a data visualization and analysis tool that calculates and displays wildfire trends and patterns for the western U.S. based on user-selected regions of interest, time periods, and ecosystem types. For instance, users can determine whether the area burned by wildfire is increasing or decreasing over time for a specific ecoregion or for land ownership types of interest. The tool is available via a web application and generates a variety of maps, graphs, and tabular data that provide useful information for fire science and management objectives, as well as for the interested public.
Webinar recordings of the Forest Service’s Research and Development SCIENCEx FIRE week.
Fire History and Ecology
Introduction to SCIENCEx Fire Week | Jens Stevens
Indigenous Fire Stewardship and Cultural Burning | Frank Lake
Fire Exclusion and Western Forest Change | Eric Knapp
A History of Fire in the Eastern US: How Humans Modified Fire Regimes through the Holocene | Dan Dey
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This study calculated fire history metrics from the Landsat Burned Area Product (1984–2020) across the conterminous U.S. (CONUS) including (1) fire frequency, (2) time since last burn (TSLB), (3) year of last burn, (4) longest fire-free interval, (5) average fire interval length, and (6) contemporary fire return interval (cFRI).