Fighting Every Wildfire Ensures The Big Fires Are More Extreme And May Harm Forests’ Ability To Adapt To Climate Changebefore the fires have burned even 100 acres. That may seem comforting, but decades of quickly suppressing fires has had unintended consequences.However, fuel accumulation isn’t the only consequence of fire suppression.Most wildfires are low-intensity. They ignite when conditions aren’t too dry or windy, and they can often be quickly extinguished.
In our study, we used a fire modeling simulation to explore the effects of the fire suppression bias and see how they compared to the effects of global warming and fuel accumulation alone.. But over thousands of simulated fires, we found that allowing forests to burn only under the very worst conditions increased fire severity by the same amount as more than a century’s worth of fuel accumulation or 21st-century climate change.A ponderosa pine seedling sprouts after a fire in the Sierra Nevada.
Firefighters keep watch for smoke from a fire tower in the Coeur d'Alene National Forest, Idaho, in 1932. Forest Service photo by K. D. SwanWe found that while conventional suppression led to less total area burning, the yearly burned area increased more than three times faster under conventional suppression than under less aggressive suppression efforts.