Spatial and temporal pattern of wildfires in California from 2000 to 2019

The environmental pollution, property losses and casualties caused by wildfires in California are getting worse by the year. To minimize the interference of wildfires on economic and social development, and formulate targeted mitigation strategies, it is imperative to understand the scale and extent...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Scientific reports 2021-04, Vol.11 (1), p.8779-17, Article 8779
Main Authors: Li, Shu, Banerjee, Tirtha
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
704/158/2465
704/4111
Casualties
Climate change
Environmental risk
Fire prevention
Forest & brush fires
Humanities and Social Sciences
Land use
multidisciplinary
Roads & highways
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
Social change
Temporal distribution
Vapor pressure
Wildfires
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The environmental pollution, property losses and casualties caused by wildfires in California are getting worse by the year. To minimize the interference of wildfires on economic and social development, and formulate targeted mitigation strategies, it is imperative to understand the scale and extent of previous wildfire occurrences. In this study, we first investigated the temporal distributions of past wildfires in California divided by size and causes and analyzed the changes observed in the past two decades against the last century. The trend of wildfires in different time scales (yearly and monthly), as well as the distribution of wildfires across different spatial scales (administrative units, climate divisions in California from 2000 to 2019) were also studied. Furthermore, to extract the significant variables on the risk of wildfire occurrence, multivariate analyses of environmental and human-related variables with wildfire densities were carried out. The results show that the wildfire density distribution of the burned area in California conforms to the characteristics of the Pareto distribution. Over the past two decades, the frequency of small (
ISSN:2045-2322
2045-2322
DOI:10.1038/s41598-021-88131-9