ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2016
Global trends in wildfire and its impacts: perceptions versus realities in a changing world.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 49 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
49 citing papers in PubMed.
- Effect of Time-Since-Fire on Ant Communities in a Semi-Arid Landscape.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Estimating wildfire ignition probabilities with geographic weighted logistic regression.Journal of applied statistics · 2026Article
- A Flexible and Responsive Remote Study Design to Assess Gene Expression Changes During Wildfire Smoke Exposure with homeRNA, an At-home Blood Sampling Kit.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
- Fire susceptibility assessment in the Carpathians using an interpretable framework.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Analysing historical events and current management strategies of wildfires in Norway.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Ecotoxicity of Fire Retardants to Zebrafish (Journal of xenobiotics · 2025Article
- Review
- Priority research directions for wildfire science: views from a historically fire-prone and an emerging fire-prone country.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Climate, vegetation, people: disentangling the controls of fire at different timescales.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Context-dependent disturbance synergies: Subcortical competitors may constrain bark beetle outbreaks following wildfires.Ecological applications : a publication of the Ecological Society of America · 2025Article
- A global expert elicitation on present-day human-fire interactions.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Brown Carbon in East Asia: Seasonality, Sources, and Influences on Regional Climate and Air Quality.ACS environmental Au · 2025Article
- Assessing WildfireGPT: a comparative analysis of AI models for quantitative wildfire spread prediction.Natural hazards (Dordrecht, Netherlands) · 2025Article
- Anthropogenic warming is a key climate indicator of rising urban fire activity in China.National science review · 2024Article
- A monthly gridded burned area database of national wildland fire data.Scientific data · 2024Article
- Devastating Wildfires and Mental Health: Major Depressive Disorder Prevalence and Associated Factors among Residents in Alberta and Nova Scotia, Canada.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Social vulnerability of the people exposed to wildfires in U.S. West Coast states.Science advances · 2023Article
- A near real-time web-system for predicting fire spread across the Cerrado biome.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Significant increase in natural disturbance impacts on European forests since 1950.Global change biology · 2023Article
- Wildfire-induced pollution and its short-term impact on COVID-19 cases and mortality in California.Gondwana research : international geoscience journal · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Wildfire has been an important process affecting the Earth's surface and atmosphere for over 350 million years and human societies have coexisted with fire since their emergence. Yet many consider wildfire as an accelerating problem, with widely held perceptions both in the media and scientific papers of increasing fire occurrence, severity and resulting losses. However, important exceptions aside, the quantitative evidence available does not support these perceived overall trends. Instead, global area burned appears to have overall declined over past decades, and there is increasing evidence that there is less fire in the global landscape today than centuries ago. Regarding fire severity, limited data are available. For the western USA, they indicate little change overall, and also that area burned at high severity has overall declined compared to pre-European settlement. Direct fatalities from fire and economic losses also show no clear trends over the past three decades. Trends in indirect impacts, such as health problems from smoke or disruption to social functioning, remain insufficiently quantified to be examined. Global predictions for increased fire under a warming climate highlight the already urgent need for a more sustainable coexistence with fire. The data evaluation presented here aims to contribute to this by reducing misconceptions and facilitating a more informed understanding of the realities of global fire.This article is part of themed issue 'The interaction of fire and mankind'.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.