Grass Fuels Increased Wildfires Across US Heartland Due to Climate Change and Forest Neglect

Grass is becoming a major contributor to larger and more frequent wildfires in the United States due to its ubiquity, resilience, and flammability. Unlike forests, grass can ignite quickly with just an hour or day of dry weather after rainfall. Grass also thrives in environments with intermediate precipitation levels – which makes it plentiful across various regions in America’s heartland like the Plains where winters are warmer and drier than usual due to less snow cover, exposing grass to further drying out spells. Additionally, extreme drought has been increasing forest neglect, leading to larger and more intense fires that spread faster through forests as well. Grass also plays a crucial role in the fire cycle by acting like fuses between finer fuels such as leaves or twigs of trees, causing grasses to connect easily-ignited areas with bigger drought-impacted tree systems during wildfires. As more vegetation burns across Western forests and deserts, it’s being replaced primarily by annual nonnative invasive red brome and native desert bunchgrass, resulting in fires where they weren’t before due to the lack of yearly perennial grasses found elsewhere. The increasing hotter and drier conditions also suppress native plant recovery while promoting more growth of these flammable plants leading to an ever-increasing fire risk both now and increasingly for future generations as half of sagebrush, a major ecosystem in America’s lower 48 states has been lost or degraded over the last two decades.