Karen Short, a Forest Service research ecologist who contributed to the study and maintains a historical database of national wildfire reports, said understanding why they catch It is essential to prevent them and educate the public. Strategic prevention appears to be effective: According to the National Fire Protection Association, home fires in the United States have decreased. nearly half since the 1980s.
In 2024, Short expanded his wildfire archive to include more information useful to investigators, such as weather, altitude, population density, and fire duration . “We need to record those things in data to track them over time. We still track things from the 1900s,” she said.
According to Short, wildfire trends across the American West have changed due to human activity. In recent decades, ignitions from power lines, fireworks and firearms have become more common, in contrast to fires started by railroads and sawmills, which were more frequent than in the past.
Research shows vehicles and equipment may be the number one culprit, potentially causing 21% of unexplained wildfires since 1992. Last fall, airport fire in California was just such an event, burning more than 23,000 acres. And the growing number of fires that are the result of arson and accidental ignition—whether caused by smoking, shooting, or campfires—accounts for another 18 percent. In 2017, an Arizona couple chose green smoke-spewing fireworks for their baby gender reveal party that lit up sawmill fireburned nearly 47,000 acres.
But these results are not definitive. Machine learning models like the one used for the study are trained to predict the likelihood of a certain cause of fire occurring, rather than proving that a specific ignition has occurred. Although the study's model showed 90% accuracy in choosing between lightning or human activity as an ignition source when tested on fires with a known cause, accurately determining the Which of the 11 possible human behaviors is the cause is correct only half the time.
Yavar Pourmohamad, a data science doctoral researcher at Boise State University who led the study, said that knowing the possible cause of fires could help authorities warn people in areas with high risk before the fire actually starts. “It can clue people in to the most important thing to be careful of,” he said. “Maybe in the future, AI can become a reliable tool for real-world action.”
Synolakis, the USC professor, said Pourmohamad and Short's research is important for understanding how risk is changing. He advocates proactive actions such as burying power lines underground to prevent them from being blown down by the wind.
ONE 2018 research found that fires caused by downed power lines—such as the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, that same year—were increasing. Although power lines did not cause many fires, they were associated with larger areas of burned land, the authors note.
“We have to really make sure that our communities are more resilient to climate change,” Synolakis said. “As we are seeing with the extreme conditions in Los Angeles, fire suppression alone cannot be done.”