Karen Short, a Forest Service research ecologist who contributed to the study and maintains a historical database of national wildfire reports, says understanding why they start is essential to preventing them and educating the public. Strategic prevention seems to work: According to the National Fire Protection Association, home fires in the US have decreased by almost half since the 1980s.
In 2024, Short expanded his wildfire archive to include more information useful to researchers, such as climate, elevation, population density, and time of fire. “We need to capture those things in the data to track them over time. “We still trace things from the 20th century,” he said.
According to Short, wildfire trends in the western United States have changed with human activity. In recent decades, ignitions caused by power lines, fireworks, and firearms have become more common, in contrast to fires caused by railroads and sawmills that were once more common.
The study found that vehicles and equipment are likely the main culprit, potentially causing 21 percent of wildfires with no known cause since 1992. Last fall, the Fire at the airport Such an event occurred in California: more than 23,000 acres burned. And an increasing number of fires are the result of arson and accidental ignition, whether from smoking, gunshots or campfires, accounting for another 18 percent. In 2017, an Arizona couple’s choice of a smoke-spewing blue firework for a baby gender reveal party ignited controversy. sawmill fireburning nearly 47,000 acres.
But these results are not definitive. Machine learning models, like those used for the study, are trained to predict the probability of the cause of a given fire, rather than proving that a particular ignition occurred. Although the study’s model showed 90 percent accuracy in selecting between lightning or human activity as an ignition source when tested on fires with known causes, it had more difficulty determining exactly which of 11 possible human behaviors was the culprit, and He only got it right half the time.
Yavar Pourmohamad, a PhD researcher in data science at Boise State University who led the study, says knowing the likely causes of a fire could help authorities warn people in high-risk areas before it actually starts. . “It might give people an idea of what’s most important to keep in mind,” he said. “Perhaps in the future, AI can become a reliable tool for real-world action.”
Synolakis, the USC professor, says Pourmohamad and Short’s research is important for understanding how risks are changing. He advocates for proactive actions such as burying power lines underground where they cannot be shaken by winds.
TO study 2018 found that fires caused by downed power lines, such as the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, that same year, have been increasing. Although the authors note that while power lines do not account for many fires, they are associated with larger swaths of scorched earth.
“We really need to make sure that our communities are more resilient to climate change,” Synolakis said. “As we are seeing with the extreme conditions in Los Angeles, firefighting alone is not enough.”