On June 4, 2021, amid flowering saguaros and prickly pear cacti, a wildfire bloomed in the Sonoran Desert in central Arizona. Its nascent flames gorged on nonnative grasses desiccated by a long, severe drought, and the fire was further nourished by the weather. A nearby weather station recorded a temperature of 36° Celsius . And it was so dry that the blades of firefighters’ bulldozers — used to clear brush — sparked small flames as the heavy vehicles dragged on rocks.
On the fifth day, the fire neared the city of Globe. By then, it had already consumed an expanse that exceeded the area of Globe five times over. The blaze would go down as one of the largest conflagrations in Arizona history, engulfing some 700 square kilometers of land — equal to about half the area of Phoenix. But the fire would not swallow Globe.
Had it not been for the Pinal Fire, the Telegraph Fire would have burned into town, Lata says. “There’s nothing we could have done to stop it.” But as these wildfire blueprints spread, they face challenges. Keeping them updated to reflect the changing nature of the landscape is a crucial but difficult endeavor. And whether they will protect the interests of the Indigenous people who have managed the landscape for centuries remains to be seen.). Compared with four decades ago, the average area burned by western blazes each year has more than doubled.
“We want more fire,” Dunn said. He was speaking to a crowd focused on developing PODs for lands in and adjacent to California’s Los Padres National Forest, along the state’s mountainous Central Coast between Monterey and Ventura. Some of the maps were shaded in where wildfires had burned recently or where measures to reduce flammable vegetation had occurred. Other maps were colored over by a machine learning algorithm that draws from data on topography, fuel characteristics, road networks and historical fires to predict and map the most effective locations for stopping a blaze.doesn’t know the land as well as local land managers, but it can help them reach a consensus, O’Connor says..
After the Monterey workshop, the hand-drawn lines were digitized and made publicly available for viewing on the Risk Management Assistance Dashboard, an online platform developed by the Forest Service in 2020 where users can follow up with comments and suggest alterations. for a millennium, a 2022 study showed. But suppressive fire policies over the last century have drastically changed the land.