Fire ecologists with the U.S. Forest Service, University of California, Boise State University, and other academic institutions have made a surprisingly unintuitivediscovery after analyzing 30 years of wildfire data, especially as the West grapples with profound drought and hotter weather.
The study, published last month in Environmental Research Letters, found that the American West is actually experiencing far fewer wildfires than in the past.
When comparing two separate 15-year chunks of data from 1992–2006 and 2007–2020, 31% fewer fires occurred annually…