The Southeastern U.S. Prescribed Fire Permit Database: Hot Spots and Hot Moments in Prescribed Fire across the Southeastern U.S.A.

Abstract

Prescribed fire is an important land conservation tool to meet ecological, cultural, and public safety objectives across terrestrial ecosystems. While estimates of prescribed burning in the U.S.A. exceed 4.5 million hectares annually, tracking the extent of prescribed fire is problematic for several reasons and prevents an understanding of spatial and temporal trends in landscape patterns of prescribed fires. We developed a regional prescribed fire database from 12 state forestry agencies in the southeastern U.S. using records of burn location, size, and calendar days and evaluated spatial and temporal patterns in burning from 2010 to 2020. Over half of all prescribed fires in the U.S. occur in the Southeast, with five states (Florida, Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, and Mississippi) comprising over ninety percent of the burned area over a decade. We identified hot spots of concentrated prescribed fire activity on both public and private forestlands across the region, as well as regions of less burning, which often occurred in close proximity to hot spots. Temporally, most prescribed fires occurred in March and February across the region; the least activity was recorded between May and November. Our database reveals that burning is highly concentrated within the region, presumably reflecting local land ownership categories and associated land management objectives. This database and these analyses provide the first region-wide summary of fine-scale patterns of prescribed fire in the U.S. and demonstrate the potential for various analyses beyond this work for air quality modeling and remote sensing, as well as the potential impacts of demographic and land use changes.