Urban areas in the United States experience substantial wildfire impacts

How common are urban wildfires relative to those occurring in less populated places? Although they are not a new phenomenon, the prevalence of urban wildfires has been underreported in prior demographic analyses due to historic data limitations. Here we investigate a range of wildfire impacts in the United States, demonstrating how linked administrative and spatial data sources can enhance our understanding of human exposure to wildfire, especially in urbanized settings. From 1999 to 2020, wildfires consistently occurred across the rural-urban continuum, but with fatalities and structure losses concentrated in more urbanized places. Nearly three quarters of all structures destroyed by wildfires were in metropolitan or micropolitan census tracts. In contrast, wildfires burned nearly 2.5 times as much land area in rural census tracts as in metropolitan census tracts. We conclude that whether wildfire exposure is understood as more urban or more rural depends on the measurement of impact used. From 1999 to 2020, wildfires consistently occurred across the rural-urban continuum, but fatalities and structural losses were concentrated in more urbanized areas in the United States, according to an analysis of data on wildfire incidents and management records.