40 Years of Fire
How satellite data reveals four decades of escalating wildfire crisis across California's landscapes.
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Fires are getting bigger and more severe
The MTBS dataset records every fire over 1,000 acres since 1984. The pattern is unambiguous — both total area burned and high-severity burn fraction have increased sharply since 2000, driven by prolonged drought, rising temperatures, and decades of fuel accumulation.
After a severe fire, forests take decades to recover
EVI (Enhanced Vegetation Index) is a satellite-derived score from 0 to 1 that measures how much live, green vegetation covers the land. Dense forest scores ~0.55. Bare scorched earth drops to ~0.10. We tracked this score for every fire event from ignition through 3 years of recovery.
EVI figures are illustrative reference values, not computed from this dataset.