Georgia’s latest wildfires, which destroyed dozens of homes, are illustrating a broader pattern that researchers say is taking hold beyond the country’s traditional fire-prone regions. Fire scientists said the eastern U.S. is seeing more damaging fire behavior as climate change contributes to hotter and drier conditions, leaving fuels easier to ignite and more difficult to control.
This year, the U.S. National Interagency Fire Center reported that 2,802 square miles (7,258 square kilometers) of the country had burned in wildfires as of mid-April, with much of the acreage in Nebraska. The tally is 88% above the 10-year average for this point in the season, reflecting a combination of unusually warm weather and drought in multiple areas, including parts of the eastern U.S., according to AP’s reporting.
Fire scientist Mike Flannigan of Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia, Canada, linked the trend to warming-driven shifts in fire conditions. “The warmer we get, the more fire we see. Longer fire seasons, more lightning possibly, and drier fuels,” Flannigan said. He added, “I think we’re going to see more fire in the East. We’re seeing more intense fires.”
Researchers also emphasized that while eastern fires have historically tended to be smaller than those in the West, that dynamic is changing. A 2023 study by University of Florida fire ecologists Victoria Donovan and Carissa Wonkka reported that the number of large fires, the likelihood of large fires happening and the amount of land burned increased in most of the Southeast United States from 1984 to 2020. Donovan said that although eastern fires might not have always drawn the same attention as western megafires, the East is now showing measurable shifts in fire behavior.
Donovan said scientists have been working to quantify the changes rather than assume lessons from the West always apply in the East. She described how the research group is focused on conditions in eastern forests and on a landscape feature known as the wildland-urban interface, where dense forests meet high numbers of people. “Even though the changes that we’re seeing in the East are much smaller than we’re quantifying out West, we think it’s extremely important to start to get ahead of this problem now,” Donovan said. She added that 45% of all large wildfires in the East burn some portion of the wildland-urban interface, while 55% of the area burned is associated with wildland-urban interface fires.
A further factor in the eastern risk picture is fuel left behind after major storms. Nick Nauslar, a National Weather Service fire science and operations officer at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho, said federal and state officials issued an advisory about potential wildfire threats after examining drought conditions and the dead-tree impacts from Hurricane Helene in 2024. “They are thinking, you know, they could see more fires, more resistance to control with the fires that they get,” Nauslar said.
Nauslar said Helene’s damage created an “excess of fuel” as dead trees were left exposed to weather and climate. “And then if you get dry and windy conditions, if you get an ignition, it’s more likely to ignite and spread,” he said. In Georgia alone, a November 2024 assessment by the University of Georgia and the Georgia Forestry Commission found that 13,954 square miles (36,142 square kilometers) of forest land was hit by Hurricane Helene, downing more than 26 million tons of pine and 30 million tons of hardwood.
Marshall Shepherd, a University of Georgia meteorology professor, said the fuel buildup creates heightened danger. “Many of us have worried about fuel buildup post-Helene. It’s a ticking time bomb,” Shepherd said. The warning reflected concerns that dead, downed wood can become increasingly flammable during dry stretches, raising the risk of both ignition and rapid spread.
Scientists also pointed to the role of dry air, not only rainfall deficits. Flannigan said the atmosphere’s ability to remove moisture from dead fuels increases sharply as temperatures rise. “As we warm … the atmosphere’s ability to suck moisture out of dead fuel, not live fuel, but dead fuel, increases almost exponentially as temperature increases,” Flannigan said. He added that drier dead fuels can make fires easier to start and can contribute to higher-intensity fires that are “difficult to impossible to extinguish,” a dynamic he said is increasingly affecting the East.
Donovan said eastern forests are also denser and less likely to be thinned out than many western landscapes, affecting how fuels accumulate over time. She and other researchers said that understanding those regional differences is part of why a network for studying eastern fires was created three months earlier, centered on the idea that wildfire drivers in the East can differ from those in the West.