Wildfire Trends Across the US over the past 29 Years Could Provide insight for Watersheds Impacted¶

Large wildfires have increased in both frequency and magnitude across the US in the past few decades due to climate change and other anthropogenic forcings, leading to widespread forest mortality, increased carbon emissions, and periods of reduced air quality in the regions impacted (Abatzoglou and Williams, 2016). Communities and infrastructure within these regions have been placed at risk prompting research and preventative plans to be put in place to better understand wildfire dynamics and reduce impacts. Increased wildfire occurrence comes with a hefty price tag, in 2017 alone, total wildfire expenses for the state of California (fire suppression, insurance, and recovery cost) equated to 180 billion dollars (Huber, 2018).

For this analysis we utilize historical fire data from the US Forest service and regional scale watershed boundaries from the U.S. Geological Survey to evaluate both fire occurrence and size by region over the past 29 years. This allows for spatiotemporal trends in wildfire occurrence to be observed across the US, and identify watershed heavily impacted by wildfire occurrence.

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Citations:¶

Abatzoglou, J. T., & Williams, A. P. (2016). Impact of anthropogenic climate change on wildfire across western US forests. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 113(42), 11770–11775. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1607171113

Huber K.,(2018). Resilience strategies for wildfire. Center for Climate and Energy Solutions.

Data Citations:¶

U.S. Geological Survey, 2023, USGS National Watershed Boundary Dataset (published 20230828). File Geodatabase. Vector digital dataset. Accessed October, 17, 2023 at URL https://prd-tnm.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html? prefix=StagedProducts/Hydrography/WBD/National/GDB/

Short, Karen C. 2022. Spatial wildfire occurrence data for the United States, 1992-2020 [FPA_FOD_20221014]. 6th Edition. Fort Collins, CO: Forest Service Research Data Archive. https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2013-0009.6