Abstract
Wildfires have been an integral part of Earth's ecology for over 400 million years, and impact many terrestrial ecosystems at present. Wildfires provide habitat diversity and promote biodiversity, but can be costly to humans in terms of destroyed infrastructure and loss of life. Global mapping of annual wildfires by satellite remote sensing suggests that ∼200 to ∼500 Mha of land‐surface burn annually. Highest amounts of annual area burned are typically found in tropical seasonal forest, savanna, and grassland systems, but fires are also common in other ecosystems, including temperate grasslands and boreal forest. Humans have used fire ignition or the suppression of fire as a landscape management technique for thousands of years, altering the fire regimes of an estimated 60% of Earth's current terrestrial habitat. Land‐use changes and fire suppression have led to a decrease in global annual area burned in recent decades. How future landscape modification and anthropogenic climate change will impact Earth's wildfire regimes is an important concern and an area of much research.