# US wildfire causes, 2025: data and charts

Retrieved 28 October 2026. Original charts by NuraGaze, using US government data from the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) and National Interagency Coordination Center (NICC). These are reported US wildfires for 2025, not a global estimate.

## Primary sources

- Human-caused fires and acres: https://www.nifc.gov/fire-information/statistics/human-caused
- Lightning-caused fires and acres: https://www.nifc.gov/fire-information/statistics/lightning-caused
- National totals: https://www.nifc.gov/fire-information/statistics/wildfires
- Regional cause counts and acres: NICC 2025 Wildland Fire Summary and Statistics annual report, printed page 15 (PDF page 18): https://www.nifc.gov/sites/default/files/NICC/2-Predictive%20Services/Intelligence/Annual%20Reports/2025/annual_report_2025.pdf#page=18

The data files are a manually transcribed snapshot of the national totals and four regional rows used in the article. They include original counts and acres as well as calculated shares; they are not a new fire inventory. Geographic areas are NIFC reporting regions.

## Calculations

National fire count: 69,556 human-caused + 8,294 lightning-caused = 77,850.

National area burned: 2,274,333 human-caused acres + 2,857,141 lightning-caused acres = 5,131,474 acres.

Each percentage is the cause's count (or acreage) divided by the sum of the two published cause counts (or acreages) for that same region and year, multiplied by 100. Displayed percentages are rounded to one decimal place. The CSV and JSON retain unrounded calculations.

Both charts have a 0–100% scale. Human activity is orange, and lightning is green. Bar widths use the unrounded percentages. Mobile and desktop versions show the same data.

## Source discrepancies

The NIFC lightning web table lists 472 acres for the Northwest in 2025. The annual report lists 328,309 acres. The latter value reconciles with the published national lightning acreage when summed with the other regions and is used in the data download. The article's Northwest comparison uses only fire counts, which agree across these two sources.

The listed regional human-caused fire counts sum to 69,562, six more than the published national total of 69,556. That mismatch also appears in the annual report. National calculations use the published national total, which reconciles with 77,850 total reported fires. Regional calculations use each region's own listed counts. The national percentages rounded to one decimal place are unchanged by this discrepancy. No source values have been silently corrected or redistributed.

## Files

- `wildfire-causes-2025-data.csv`: national and selected regional counts, acres and calculated shares, with a source URL for each row.
- `wildfire-causes-2025-data.json`: the same frozen data with scope and retrieval metadata; used by the article and chart generator.
- `share-of-wildfires.svg`, `share-of-area-burned.svg`: desktop charts for use with the page's HTML titles, captions and accessible data tables.
- `*-mobile.svg`: corresponding mobile layouts.
- `share-of-wildfires.png`, `share-of-area-burned.png`: standalone charts from the approved draft, including source credits.
- `cover.png`: article-card and social-sharing graphic.

The website assets can be regenerated with `python3 scripts/generate-wildfire-causes-2025-charts.py` in an environment containing Matplotlib. This is an editorial tool, not a website runtime dependency. The standalone PNG downloads are retained from the article draft.

## Interpretation

Human-caused includes accidental and deliberate ignitions and is not a measure of arson. Burned area is not a direct measure of property damage, ecological severity or preventable loss. These data do not establish how much loss an early-warning system would have prevented.