Should Smokey Bear Move to TikTok?

Les’s article about Smokey Bear signage reminded me of this (2018) Nagy et al. paper. I read lots of climate media and papers and it is a given in some that “climate causes increased wildfires.”  As we know, climate (or changes in weather over time) can certainly influence fire behavior, but so can fuel conditions, suppression strategies and tactics, and …. ignitions. This seems obvious, and more easily dealt with than decarbonizing  global energy production, so it seems like something scientists would want to look at.  We have seen fires start from power lines, people driving in dry grass, and people doing what appear to be really stupid things to celebrate events, and a variety of other causes.  Many of these ignition sources have been the targets of  behavioral change efforts via media, lawsuits or criminal charges.  It seems like a likely topic for social scientists to look at.. what are all the human caused sources? What has worked in practice to reduce them?

Does anyone know of such studies?

From the paper:

Large Fire Seasonality

The seasonal expansion of large wildfires in the spring in the eastern U.S. (Figure 3a) was similar to the pattern of fires of all sizes [5], with many large human-caused fires occurring earlier in the year than large lightning-caused fires (Figure S6) and outside of the lightning fire season (Figure S7). Given the strong correlations previously identified between large fires and climate [3,18,34,49,56], we expected large fires across the U.S. to be more likely during dry, hot summer months in the western U.S. In the eastern U.S., the seasonality of large human-caused fires was highly correlated with the seasonality of human-caused fires of all sizes across most eastern ecoregions (Figure 4). These results suggest that seasonal climate does not play an important role in facilitating large fires in the East. Instead, ignition pressure is the primary driver of large fires in these ecoregions. This finding is consistent with [57], who showed that human ignitions are a more important driver of fire than climate in the eastern U.S. In the northwestern U.S., the seasonal correlation between large fires and all fires was lower (Figure 4), suggesting that climate conditions may play a more important role in facilitating large fires here. Nonetheless, even in ecoregions of the intermountain west where climate is known to influence large fires [2,12,56], human ignitions explained a substantial portion of the seasonal pattern of large fires (r > 0.66; Figure 4). This finding suggests that ignition pressure, and human expansion of ignitions [5], plays a much larger role in influencing large fires than previously thought.