Forest fires can devastate vast swaths of land, but in the United States, another category of conflagrations takes the title of most destructive.
Of the homes destroyed in wildfires across the contiguous United States from 1990 to 2020, 64 percent — nearly 11,000 — were razed by grassland and shrubland fires, researchers report in the Nov. 10 Science.
“We often think about forest fires because that’s what we see on the news … they’re dramatic, they’re huge, they’re intense,” says ecologist Volker Radeloff of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “but grassland and shrubland fires can also be quite destructive.” For instance, the 2023 Lahaina fire on the Hawaiian island
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