The Southeastern U.S. Prescribed Fire Permit Database: Hot Spots and Hot Moments in Prescribed Fire across the Southeastern U.S.A.

Abstract

Prescribed fire is an important land conservation tool to meet ecological, cultural, and public safety objectives across terrestrial ecosystems. While estimates of prescribed burning in the U.S.A. exceed 4.5 million hectares annually, tracking the extent of prescribed fire is problematic for several reasons and prevents an understanding of spatial and temporal trends in landscape patterns of prescribed fires. We developed a regional prescribed fire database from 12 state forestry agencies in the southeastern U.S. using records of burn location, size, and calendar days and evaluated spatial and temporal patterns in burning from 2010 to 2020. Over half of all prescribed fires in the U.S. occur in the Southeast, with five states (Florida, Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, and Mississippi) comprising over ninety percent of the burned area over a decade. We identified hot spots of concentrated prescribed fire activity on both public and private forestlands across the region, as well as regions of less burning, which often occurred in close proximity to hot spots. Temporally, most prescribed fires occurred in March and February across the region; the least activity was recorded between May and November. Our database reveals that burning is highly concentrated within the region, presumably reflecting local land ownership categories and associated land management objectives. This database and these analyses provide the first region-wide summary of fine-scale patterns of prescribed fire in the U.S. and demonstrate the potential for various analyses beyond this work for air quality modeling and remote sensing, as well as the potential impacts of demographic and land use changes.

Defining Disadvantaged Places: Social Burdens of Wildfire Exposure in the Eastern United States, 2000–2020

“…Exposure in the Eastern U.S. can be characterized as high-probability, low-impact events, with most exposure focused in the South and extending to Illinois. Most fires in the study area can be attributed to human causes such as prescribed burning, conducted for a variety of purposes (e.g., habitat maintenance, agriculture, wildfire risk mitigation) [41,58], or debris burning [59]. In addition, annual crop and property loss in the East is comparatively low, supporting the conclusion that the fires in this region, although they happen often, currently have low impacts.…”

“…Due to climate change, conditions that lead to wildfire events, such as extended high temperatures and less regular precipitation, are expected to increase, and the Southeast is expected to experience more wildfires as a result [8,40]. Wildfires in the eastern half of the U.S. are generally smaller in size, managed through controlled burns, and occur on private property [4,41]. Cattau et al [42] delineated modern fire regions in the contiguous United States based on fire frequency, burned area, event size, season length, and fire radiative power to produce eight different pyromes (e.g., generalized areas with somewhat homogenous fire characteristics).…”