ArticlePloS one2016
Incorporating Anthropogenic Influences into Fire Probability Models: Effects of Human Activity and Climate Change on Fire Activity in California.
Article in PloS one, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers.
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Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed.
- Large role of anthropogenic climate change in driving smoke concentrations across the western United States from 1992 to 2020.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Exacerbating risk in human-ignited large fires over western United States due to lower flammability thresholds and greenhouse gas emissions.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Assessment of the suitability of drought descriptions for wildfires under various humid temperate climates in Japan.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- The importance of geography in forecasting future fire patterns under climate change.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Repeated exposure to eucalyptus wood smoke alters pulmonary gene and metabolic profiles in male Long-Evans rats.Toxicological sciences : an official journal of the Society of Toxicology · 2024Article
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- Importance of subsurface water for hydrological response during storms in a post-wildfire bedrock landscape.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Anthropogenic climate change impacts exacerbate summer forest fires in California.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
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- Quantifying the environmental limits to fire spread in grassy ecosystems.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Innovative wood use can enable carbon-beneficial forest management in California.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Identifying Key Drivers of Wildfires in the Contiguous US Using Machine Learning and Game Theory Interpretation.Earth's future · 2021Article
- Estimating PM2.5-related premature mortality and morbidity associated with future wildfire emissions in the western US.Environmental research letters : ERL [Web site] · 2021Article
- Relationships of climate, human activity, and fire history to spatiotemporal variation in annual fire probability across California.PloS one · 2021Article
- A machine learning framework for multi-hazards modeling and mapping in a mountainous area.Scientific reports · 2020Article
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- Wildfires and the role of their drivers are changing over time in a large rural area of west-central Spain.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- Models meet data: Challenges and opportunities in implementing land management in Earth system models.Global change biology · 2018Review
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Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The costly interactions between humans and wildfires throughout California demonstrate the need to understand the relationships between them, especially in the face of a changing climate and expanding human communities. Although a number of statistical and process-based wildfire models exist for California, there is enormous uncertainty about the location and number of future fires, with previously published estimates of increases ranging from nine to fifty-three percent by the end of the century. Our goal is to assess the role of climate and anthropogenic influences on the state's fire regimes from 1975 to 2050. We develop an empirical model that integrates estimates of biophysical indicators relevant to plant communities and anthropogenic influences at each forecast time step. Historically, we find that anthropogenic influences account for up to fifty percent of explanatory power in the model. We also find that the total area burned is likely to increase, with burned area expected to increase by 2.2 and 5.0 percent by 2050 under climatic bookends (PCM and GFDL climate models, respectively). Our two climate models show considerable agreement, but due to potential shifts in rainfall patterns, substantial uncertainty remains for the semiarid inland deserts and coastal areas of the south. Given the strength of human-related variables in some regions, however, it is clear that comprehensive projections of future fire activity should include both anthropogenic and biophysical influences. Previous findings of substantially increased numbers of fires and burned area for California may be tied to omitted variable bias from the exclusion of human influences. The omission of anthropogenic variables in our model would overstate the importance of climatic ones by at least 24%. As such, the failure to include anthropogenic effects in many models likely overstates the response of wildfire to climatic change.
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