By Donna Hemmila

First there was the drought. Then the fire season hit, much earlier than Californians expected this year. By the end of June, more than 1,450 wildfires were burning in California. The flames have consumed nearly 380,000 acres.

UC faculty are at the center of the state's wildfire research -- studying the effects of global warming, land management and firefighting practices -- with institutions including the UC Berkeley Center for Fire Research and Outreach, UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the UC Merced-based Sierra Nevada Research Institute and the UC Davis-based California Institute for Hazards Research. Here is a sample of their research and opinions.

Richard Minnich, professor of geography, UC Riverside earth sciences department

Fire historian Richard Minnich blames California's fire suppression policies for the growing severity of the state's wildfires. Decades of putting out wildfires has actually increased the fire danger he says, and the state would be better off letting wilderness fires burn themselves out.

"We seem to think we can control fire," he says. "Let's play a word game. Smokey the Bear says, 'Help prevent earthquakes.' Smokey the Bear says, 'Help prevent tornadoes.' Smokey the Bear says, 'Help prevent hurricanes.' Nobody in Western culture assumes that we can prevent those things. Why do we assume we can prevent fires? "

Minnich has compared the fire ecology and historical records of fires in Southern California with conditions in Baja California, looking at an area stretching roughly 150 miles on each side of the border. The terrain, climate and vegetation are similar, and before heavy development, the California side looked much like the Mexican side with grasses, sage scrub and woody chaparral. In Baja, he says, there is no fire suppression.

"There are many small fires down there -- 10 times as many as the United States side but 10 times smaller," Minnich says.

He can find no natural reason for those differences and attributes the contrast to firefighting policies. U.S. agencies have a practice of putting out wildfires as quickly as possible. In Mexico they burn until they burn out.

California's fire suppression has created large swaths of dense, old-growth vegetation that hasn't burned in decades. When those areas do ignite, the devastation is wider spread. In an area that burns more often, the landscape forms patches of vegetation of varying ages. When an older, more combustible area burns, it eventually runs into a patch of less combustible younger growth that stops the fire's progress.

"In California, we're really good at putting out nine out of 10 fires," he says. "The survival of the fittest comes into play. That one 'fit' fire hammers the urban interfaces."

Minnich supports controlled burning as a way to clear out dense vegetation and in the urban interface, more stringent development policies.

"We need really vigorous zoning and land management to prevent people from building in those areas," he says. "We should treat chaparral as gasoline. No one in their right mind would build a house in a pool of gasoline."

Donald Turcotte, distinguished professor of geology, UC Davis

Using the same kind of mathematical modeling as he uses for earthquake forecasting, Donald Turcotte, a professor of geology at UC Davis, studies wildfire forecasting. (Fire forecasts can predict where fires are likely to break out, but not when. Public agencies use the forecasts to plan resource deployment during fire season.) The fire models have shown that large fires are more likely to occur when fuel is allowed to build up because small fires are suppressed. Those findings have steered him to the same conclusions Minnich has reached about the way California fights fires.

"The controlled burn is a big thing," says Turcotte. "This is a highly emotional issue. My feeling is it's a very good thing, but ecological groups are against it."

Yet the areas susceptible to burning are too vast to reduce the fuel by cutting it out, Turcotte says.

Critics of the let-it-burn philosophy point to the other factors that contribute to wildfire: ignition and wind. The early outbreak of California's June fires have been attributed, in part, to unusual strikes of dry lightning in Northern California and high winds in the early days of the conflagrations. While those natural phenomena are factors, Turcotte says, the availability of fuel is what causes the biggest fire danger.

"Sooner or later, you'll get ignition," he says. "You don't want fires to start but in terms of having big fires, it's inevitable."

He, too, favors stronger land management polices such as forcing homeowners who build in high fire-danger areas to keep vegetation cleared from around their structures. Local agencies should enforce the setback policies, he says, and insurance companies shouldn't pay the claims if a homeowner didn't keep the setback cleared.

More research emphasis needs to be on fires, he says, and suggests putting a fee on all homeowner insurance policies in California to pay for studying issues such as fire-resistant building practices and fire suppression methods.

Anthony Westerling, assistant professor of environmental engineering, and geography, UC Merced; principal investigator, California Applications Program and Climate Change Center at Scripps Institution of Oceanography

Anthony Westerling's groundbreaking 2006 study was one of the first to show a link between climate change and the increase in wildfires in the western United States.

"In the last several decades there has been a tremendous increase of fires in the western United States, and it's directly related to climate changes," he says. "Warmer spring and summer and earlier snowmelt."

Westerling and researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and other institutions constructed a database of large wildfires, more than 1,000 acres, between 1970 and 2003 and compared it with climate data. They found a sudden and dramatic increase in fires in the mid-'80s that they link to climate warming.

A temperature increase of less than 1 degree Celsius, Westerling says, resulted in a 300 percent increase in the number of fires and a 600 percent increase in the areas burned. The temperature increase also lengthened the fire season by 78 days. The average large fire in the '70s typically burned for a week. In the 2000s, he says, big fires go for an average of five weeks.

Some climate change scientists have predicted that average temperatures will increase by 1.5 degrees C to 5.8 degrees C by the end of the 21st century. If that scenario materializes, more wildfires are in the future, and the impact on the state will be devastating.

"Suppose you had a location that burned every 100 years and now because of climate change it wants to burn every 20 years?" Westerling asks. "What would that do to the ecosystem? You might get a shift in species and carbon storage."

Scott Stephens, associate professor of fire sciences, UC Berkeley; co-director, Center for Fire Research and Outreach

Scott Stephens, who directs the Fire Science Laboratory at UC Berkeley, is in Australia studying that country's fire management policies.

"The Australians are way ahead of us in managing fire in the urban interface," he says.

They've reduced their losses from wildfires by 80 percent, he says, through a different approach to battling fires in the regions where development is butting up against wilderness areas, a condition that is growing outside every major urban area in California.

In Australia, rural fire brigades are trained to stay and defend their homes rather than wait for local fire departments to rescue them or evacuate the area. Communities have fire trailers equipped with hoses and firefighting equipment they are trained to use. When fire erupts they either leave immediately, he says, or stay prepared to fight.

"They engage people much more in the firefighting process," he says. "If you're going to fight your own fires, you're going to make sure your house is pretty fire safe."

That has been the building trend in Australia's urban interface, Stephens is finding. California's urban interface continues to spread out into more wilderness areas. Stephens believes if tougher building codes were imposed and enforced by a state agency such as CalFire, those new developments would be more fire-resistant and eventually form a protective buffer around the older urban interface communities.

"Unless we really start to engage the urban interface dwellers, we're going to keep building in the same way," he says. "Why would it change? We're going in the wrong direction, and we're very vulnerable."

Donna Hemmila is editor of Your University.