Forest fires can devastate vast swaths of land, but in the United States, another category of conflagrations takes the title of most destructive.
“We often think about forest fires because that’s what we see on the news … they’re dramatic, they’re huge, they’re intense,” says ecologist Volker Radeloff of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “but grassland and shrubland fires can also be quite destructive.” For instance, the 2023 Lahaina fire on the Hawaiian island of Maui, fueled by invasive wild grasses, killed at least 98 people and destroyed some 2,200 buildings.
For the new study, Radeloff and his colleagues analyzed three decades of data on wildfire occurrence, land use and housing, hoping to learn more about what factors fuel such destructive blazes.
The team found that about 337,000 square kilometers of grasslands and shrublands burned from 1990 to 2020, compared with about 144,000 square kilometers burned by forest fires. Though forest fires were about twice as likely as grassland fires to burn down homes they encountered, the much larger expanse burned by grassland and shrubland fires helped make them more destructive overall.
2023-11-09 14:00:00
Post from www.sciencenews.org