Karen Short, a research ecologist with the Forest Service who contributed to the study and maintains a historical database of national fire reports, says understanding why they start is essential to preventing them and educating the public. Strategic prevention appears to be working: According to the National Fire Protection Association, home fires have decreased in the United States Nearly half since the 1980s.
In 2024, Short Archive expanded its wildfire profile to include more information useful to investigators, such as weather, elevation, population density, and fire timing. “We need to capture those things in the data to track them over time. We’re still tracking things from the 20th century,” she said.
Wildfire trends across the western United States have shifted with human activity, according to Palaces. In recent decades, ignitions from power lines, fireworks, and firearms have become more common, in contrast to fires caused by railroads and sawmills that were once again common.
The study found that vehicles and equipment are likely the primary culprit, potentially causing 21 percent of wildfires without a known cause since 1992. Last fall, Airport fire In California there was such an event, burning more than 23,000 acres. An increasing number of fires are the result of arson and accidental ignition – whether from smoking, fire or campfires – making up another 18 percent. In 2017, an Arizona couple’s choice lit up a smokey blue firework for their baby’s gender reveal. Sawmill fireseast of approximately 47,000 acres.
But these results are not final. Machine learning models like the one used in the study are trained to predict the likelihood of a particular fire cause, rather than proving that a particular ignition occurred. Although the study’s model showed 90 percent accuracy between lightning or human activity as the source of ignition when tested on fires with known causes, it had more difficulty identifying which of 11 possible human behaviors was to blame, only half the time.
Knowing the potential causes of a fire could help authorities warn people in at-risk areas before a fire actually starts, says Yavar Pourmohamad, a doctoral researcher in data science at Boise State University who led the study. “It can give people a hint of what’s most important to be careful of,” he said. “Perhaps in the future, artificial intelligence can become a trustworthy tool for working in the real world.”
Synolakis, the USC professor, says Pourmohamad and Short’s research is important for understanding how risks change. He calls for proactive measures such as burying power lines underground where they cannot be outfitted by wind.
A 2018 study It found that fires started by downed power lines — such as the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, in the same year — may be increasing. Although the authors note that although power lines do not account for many fires, they are associated with larger areas of burned land.
“We have to really make sure that our communities are more resilient to climate change,” Synolakis said. “As we see with the extreme conditions in Los Angeles, fire suppression alone does not do it.”
