Reno, Nev. (Oct. 13, 2026) – The Western U.S. is facing parallel and escalating hazards in the form of ongoing drought and increasingly frequent wildfires. Although the region's ecosystems have evolved with wildfires, the intensity and frequency of blazes where people live and recreate remains a persistent challenge for communities. New research examines tradeoffs in wildfire resilience when Western communities face hard decisions about adaptation strategies to drought, such as retiring or converting irrigated cropland. The question has widespread implications across the region, with more than 4 million hectares of cropland loss across the Western U.S. over the last 40 years.
The research, published October 12th in the journal Environmental Research Letters , was co-led by Austen Lorenz and DRI's Bea Gordon alongside colleagues including fire managers. They examined wildfire perimeter data for nearly 10,000 fires from 1985 to 2024 to create the first regional assessment of cropland's association with where wildfires stop. The study's results found that cropland serves as a landscape-scale buffer to wildfire as demonstrated across 11 Western states. When compared to other land uses like wildlands, urban communities, and forests, cropland is simply less likely to end up inside a wildfire burn scar. The research has implications for improving management of both water saving strategies and wildfire risk reduction, which the authors suggest should be managed jointly, rather than in isolation.
"As a hydrologist, I think a big focus for our community is looking at how much water crops use, and how much water can be conserved by changing or reducing crop production in drought-stricken areas," Gordon said. "I've thought a lot less about what those changes mean after the land use has changed. After working with wildfire managers, it became clear that drought adaptation strategies that alter cropland can influence how wildfire moves through the landscape. It's a reminder that out here in the West, we don't have the luxury of thinking of just one hazard anymore."
The researchers propose that well-irrigated crops may hold enough moisture that they act as an effective barrier to wildfire progression. The wide-open spaces can also serve as staging points for fire fighters during active blazes, reinforcing their use as a landscape-scale buffer. This effect is amplified where irrigation overlaps with fire season, as observed in California's Central Valley, Washington's Columbia Basin, and Idaho's Snake River Plain.
The study focused on areas where wildfires and cropland converged in the Western U.S., finding that approximately 10.6 million acres of cropland have transitioned to other uses in these regions since 1985 — an area about the size of Switzerland. Much of it converted to scrubland or other low-lying vegetation that is more flammable than irrigated farmland. About 20% of it was developed into human communities, largely focused around metropolitan areas, with the inherent risks for new ignition sources and increased challenges for fire suppression efforts this brings. Removing the cropland eliminates the fire buffering advantages it conferred, regardless of the land type that cropland converted to. Across nearly 10,000 fires over four decades, cropland was 1.3 to 5 times more associated with where fires stopped than other land types, with only barren land serving as an equally effective fire barrier. Although this is the first analysis of its kind for the Western U.S., the results are consistent with similar research on the fire-buffering value of croplands conducted in Europe.
The researchers emphasize that targeted and voluntary idling of cropland is a widely used and practical strategy for reducing agricultural water use. They propose supporting institutional structures that integrate water and wildfire planning, developing methods to evaluate transition-specific water savings against wildfire risk, and using existing agricultural conservation programs as planning platforms. Programs like the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Conservation Reserve Program, which offers financial incentives to agricultural landowners to convert environmentally sensitive land, could be expanded to integrate fire-buffering value alongside existing criteria.
"We want to stress that there's no binary answer here, the complexity can't be reduced to simply 'fire is bad' or 'cropland is water intensive,'" Gordon said. "Hopefully, this can help us evaluate where the trade-offs are steepest when we're looking at compounding hazards."
The research team hopes to expand on this research to quantify wildfire risk for different cropland conversions to help Western communities better plan for a future with both less water and larger, more severe wildfires.
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More information: The full study, Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire? Tradeoffs between Drought Adaptation and Wildfire Risk under Cropland Loss and Urbanization in the Western United States is available from Environmental Research Letters at DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/aeacff
Study authors include: Austen Lorenz (Aythya Analytics), Beatrice Gordon (DRI), Gabrielle Boisrame (DRI), Julia Berkey (All Hands Ecology), Chelsea Cough (National Interagency Fire Center), Rosemary Carroll (DRI), & Christine Albano (DRI)
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