Useful information
Prime News delivers timely, accurate news and insights on global events, politics, business, and technology
Karen Short, an environmental researcher of the forest service that contributed to the study and maintains a historical database of national forest fire reports, says that understanding why they start is essential to prevent them and educate the public. Strategic prevention seems to work: according to the National Fire Protection Association, domestic fires in the US almost half since the 1980s.
In 2024, Short extended its forest fire file to include more useful information for researchers, such as climate, elevation, population density and fire moment. “We need to capture those things in the data to track them over time. We still track things from the twentieth century, ”he said.
According to Short, forest fire trends in western United States have changed with human activity. In recent decades, the ignitions caused by electricity lines, fireworks and firearms have become more common, in contrast to the fires caused by railways and sawmills that were once more common.
The study found that vehicles and equipment are probably the main culprits, potentially causing 21 percent of forest fires without known cause since 1992. The past fall, the Fire in the airport In California there was an event of this type: more than 23,000 acres were burned. And an increasing number of fires are the result of caused fires and accidental ignition, either by smoking, shots or fires, which represent another 18 percent. In 2017, the choice of an Arizona couple of a blue artificial fire that threw smoke for a revelation party of the baby’s genre lit the Sawmill fireburning about 47,000 acres.
But these results are not definitive. Automatic learning models, such as those used for study, are trained to predict the probability of the cause of a given fire, instead of demonstrating that a particular ignition occurred. Although the study model showed a 90 percent accuracy when selecting between rays or human activity as a source of ignition when it was tested in fires with known causes, it had more difficulties in determining exactly which of the 11 possible human behaviors was the culprit, and He only succeeded in half of the time.
Yavar Pourmohamad, a doctoral researcher at data science at Boise State University who directed the study, says that knowing the probable causes of a fire could help the authorities warn people in high -risk areas before it really begins . “I could give people an idea of what is more important to consider,” he said. “Perhaps in the future, AI can become a reliable tool for action in the real world.”
Synolakis, a USC professor, says that Pourmohamad and Short research is important to understand how risks are changing. Advocates proactive actions such as burying electric lines underground where they cannot be shaken by winds.
TO 2018 study He discovered that the fires caused by fallen electricity lines, such as the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, that same year, have been increasing. Although the authors point out that, although the electricity lines do not represent many fires, they are associated with larger burns of burned land.
“We have to really make sure that our communities are more resilient to climate change,” said Synolakis. “As we are seeing with the extreme conditions in Los Angeles, fire extinction alone is not enough.”
