© Chris Ray/Texas Highway Patrol via ReutersFlames are seen along a road in a residential area in Fritch, Tex., in this image taken May 11, 2014. Fritch, located north of Amarillo, is in the southern Great Plains, which stretches into Texas.
The grasslands of U.S. Great Plains have seen one of the
sharpest increases in large and dangerous wildfires in the past three decades, with their numbers more than tripling between 1985 and 2014, according to new research.
The
new study, published in the journal
Geophysical Research Letters, found that the average number of large Great Plains wildfires each year grew from about 33 to 117 over that time period, even as the area of land burned in these wildfires increased by 400 percent.
"This is undocumented and unexpected for this region," said Victoria Donovan, the lead author of the study and a researcher at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. "Most studies do document these shifts in large wildfires in forested areas, and this is one of the first that documents a shift, at this scale, in an area characterized as a grassland."
Donovan published the study with two university colleagues. The research looked at large wildfires, defined as fires around 1,000 acres or more in size.
In other parts of the globe, such as Africa's savannas, grassland fires are extremely common — and that used to be true for the Great Plains as well. But in the past century or more, Donovan explained, wildfire suppression techniques — such as rapidly catching fires and putting them out — had largely eradicated them from the region.
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