Research Database
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Three-decade record of contiguous-U.S. national forest wildfires indicates increased density of ignitions near roads
Year: 2026
BackgroundRoads play an important role in managing fire on the national forests. But roads also are known to increase ignitions and damage ecosystems. Roads may limit the size of wildfires, which may be viewed as desirable where fires endanger human life and property or undesirable if roadlessness allows more land to experience the ecological benefits of fire. In this paper, we examine a large, nationwide dataset to determine whether roads on the national forests are associated with higher ignition density, and we examine patterns of fire size to see whether wilderness and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Predictive Understanding of Wildfire Ignitions Across the Western United States
Year: 2026
Wildfires have increasingly affected human and natural systems across the western United States (WUS) in recent decades. Given that the majority of ignitions are human-caused and potentially preventable, improving the ability to predict fire occurrence is critical for effective wildfire prevention and risk mitigation. We used over 500,000 wildfire ignition records from 2000 to 2020 to develop machine learning models that predict daily ignition probability across the WUS and incorporate a wide range of physical, biological, social, and administrative variables. A key innovation of this work is…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Projections of Lightning-Ignited Wildfire Risk in the Western United States
Year: 2025
Cloud-to-ground (CG) lightning is a major source of summer wildfire ignition in the western United States (WUS). However, future projections of lightning are uncertain since lightning is not directly simulated by most global climate models. To address this issue, we use convolutional neural network (CNN)-based parameterizations of daily June-September CG lightning. CNN parameterizations of daily CG lightning occurrence at each grid cell use fields of three thermodynamic variables—ratio of surface Moist Static Energy (MSE) to 500 hPa saturation MSE, 700–500 hPa lapse rate, and 500…
Publication Type: Journal Article