Fire is a natural component of terrestrial ecosystems in the Northeast with many forest ecosystems adapted to fire. However, intense or sustained fires can have large impacts on forest regeneration and community composition. Although the Northeast is a relatively temperate region with few large fires, changing climate may bring hotter and drier weather that could result in increased fire frequency, extent and severity. Based on 27 years of data from the Fire Program Analysis (FPA) fire-occurrence database, we extracted the location and size for all fires across the region.

Analysis

• Frequency
• Extent
• Severity
• Location

Disturbance Trend Summary

These data show a significant increase in the number of fires annually.

Fire severity, assessed here by maximum fire size shows no significant change over time, likely due to extreme year to year variability in the occurrence of large fires.

Highlights

• The maximum fire size in any given year is generally low, but large fires can occur in the region (e.g. 5000 acres in 1995).
• We are seeing an increase in both the total acres burned and the total number of fires reported across the region but a decrease in the average size of those fires indicates that smaller fires are becoming more common.
• New York has the largest number of reported fires and largely drives the regional increase in frequency. This suggests that reporting methods may be introducing bias into the dataset.
• Fires are most frequent in higher density population areas.