Wildfires used to be rare in the Great Plains. They’ve more than tripled in 30 years

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. 2011 saw a particularly large surge of Great Plains wildfires, which accounted for half of the total acreage burned in the United States that year.By specific region, some of the largest wildfire increases occurred in the Cross Timbers region of Texas and Oklahoma (which saw a 2,200 percent increase in the total area burned), the Edwards Plateau of Texas (a 3,300 percent increase), and the Central Irregular Plains, encompassing parts of Iowa and northern Missouri, as well as parts of Kansas and Oklahoma (1,400 percent increase).