Western US wildfires have gotten less frequent, though larger

In populous regions, higher population density is linked to fewer fires, while adding people to emptier areas makes blazes more common

American Geophysical Union

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WASHINGTON — The number of wildfires burning in the Western United States each year dropped roughly 28% over the past three decades, even as annual burned area and damage from wildfires have soared. A decline in fires accidentally sparked by humans accounts for over 40% of the overall trend, according to a new study. 

In areas with few people, fires get more frequent as population density rises. Push past a certain density, however, and fire frequency starts to fall. Understanding how shifting human demographics influence wildfire can help scientists more accurately predict how fire patterns will change going forward.  

“It would be premature to talk about informing fire management [based on] these results, but the main implication is that we can incorporate these results into projections of future fire activity,” said Gavin Madakumbura, an atmospheric and oceanic scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and lead author of the study. 

The study will appear Thursday, April 30 in Earth’s Future, AGU’s journal for research on the state of the planet and its inhabitants and their future resilience in the Anthropocene. 

More burning, fewer blazes 

Wildfire impacts are mounting across much of the Western U.S. The rise in annual burned area from 1992 to 2020 amounts to an increase of about 4% each year. Nine million acres burned in 2020, more than the entire land area of the state of Maryland. 

Because of all of this, people often assume the number of fires is increasing, too. But after examining a comprehensive dataset of fire occurrence in the Western U.S. including fire dates, locations, sizes and causes, Madakumbura and his coauthors uncovered a decline from over 25,000 fires per year in 1992 to about 18,000 per year in 2020 — equivalent to 305 fewer fires each year across the 11 continental western states. 

Madakumbura said the rise in burned area is due largely to human-driven climate warming, which amplifies the hot, dry conditions that stoke fires to huge sizes. But how often fires start in the first place depends on more than just climate: everyday human activities and fire prevention measures play a role, too. 

“We hear people saying the burned area has been increasing, fire damages have been increasing, fire frequency has been increasing. But…fire frequency is more complicated than that,” Madakumbura said. “We wanted to take a stab at that with the best tools we have right now, to see if fire frequency is, in fact, increasing.” 

In many parts of the West, the team noted, fires started by humans declined more steeply than those from natural causes like lightning. The trend varied by region, however: human ignitions dropped significantly in California and Arizona, for instance, but rose in Wyoming. 

To unravel the discrepancy, the team delved into population density data over the same period, as well as financial data from the U.S. Census Bureau showing fire protection and management expenditures at the state level. States with higher population densities, they noticed, spend disproportionately more on fire protection: California’s average annual fire spending, for instance, outstrips Wyoming’s by over seven billion dollars. 

The findings align with something scientists call the “pyric transition.” In sparsely populated regions, the idea goes, adding more people leads to more fires accidentally sparked by human activity. But past a certain threshold of population density, more people also means more coordinated fire prevention and public awareness efforts to tackle the rising risk. This, coupled with the fragmented, patchwork nature of more populated landscapes, can end up making fires less frequent. 

While the correlation between population density and fire-prevention spending is strong, the team’s findings don’t absolutely prove that the former directly causes the latter. Fire prevention efforts may also arise in response to rising fire risks as climate change makes western landscapes more arid, Madakumbura said. In this sense, climate change could be triggering both a rise in fire frequency and, in places with sufficient resources, prevention efforts to push it back down. But Madakumbura suspects population density plays an active part as well. 

“We know that with increasing human activity, we get more accidental human ignitions. But at the same time, a lot of regions are spending so much money on fire prevention and fire awareness, so we should see this in the data,” he said. That made it extra satisfying, he added, to see the regional differences in fire frequency trends his team uncovered. “The data definitely seem to indicate that this is a possible causative relationship.” 

Not all good news 

Exceptions do exist: urban hotspots including Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Denver appear to be seeing more frequent fires despite their high population densities. Madakumbura said this may owe partly to inconsistent reporting practices among local and regional fire agencies, with city- and county-level agencies recording more small, urban fires as their populations rise, while state and federal agencies focus more on wildland fires. The “pyric transition” may also not apply to every city or county individually, although it appears once you zoom out to the state and multi-state levels. 

Unraveling the connection between human demographics and fire frequency, the team wrote, will help scientists gauge future fire patterns more accurately than if they considered only the impact of climate change. Previous research, they also noted, has shown that most fire damage to human communities comes from fires sparked by humans themselves, and that aggressive fire suppression efforts can cause wildfire fuels to build up over time, making fires more extreme when they do occur. 

“Even though we have been able to reduce the number of fires through fire preparedness, fire awareness, and spending a lot of money on protective measures, there is a disconnect,” Madakumbura said. “We haven’t been able to reduce the damages.” 

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Notes for journalists:    

This study will be published in Earth’s Future, an open access AGU journal, and is under embargo until Thursday, April 30, 2026 at 13:00 UTC. Journalists may request an embargoed copy of the study by emailing news@agu.org. The study will be available to view and download at this link after the embargo lifts: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2025EF007077 

Paper title: “Evolving Fire Frequency in the Western United States and Its Links to Human Influence”  

Authors:    

• Gavin D. Madakumbura, Department of Geography, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, United States 

• A. Park Williams, Department of Geography, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, United States; Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, United States 

• Karen C. Short, Department of Agriculture, United States Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station, Missoula, Montana, United States 

• Max A. Moritz, Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California, United States; University of California Cooperative Extension, Oakland, California, United States 

• Bowen Wang, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States 

• Caroline S. Juang, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Columbia University, New York, New York, United States 

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  AGU (www.agu.org) is a global community supporting more than half a million professionals and advocates in Earth and space sciences. Through broad and inclusive partnerships, AGU aims to advance discovery and solution science that accelerate knowledge and create solutions that are ethical, unbiased and respectful of communities and their values. Our programs include serving as a scholarly publisher, convening virtual and in-person events and providing career support. We live our values in everything we do, such as our net zero energy renovated building in Washington, D.C. and our Ethics and Equity Center, which fosters a diverse and inclusive geoscience community to ensure responsible conduct.   

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Journal

Earth's Future

DOI

10.1029/2025EF007077 

Article Title

Evolving Fire Frequency in the Western United States and Its Links to Human Influence

 

FAU study reveals how camels ‘beat the heat’ at the cellular level

Florida Atlantic University

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Researchers examined how temperature changes affect gene activity in mammalian skin fibroblasts, comparing humans with one-humped camels, a species known for thriving in extreme heat.

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Credit: Alex Dolce, Florida Atlantic University

Living organisms must constantly adjust to their environment to survive. One of the most fundamental challenges is temperature. Even small shifts in heat or cold can disrupt the delicate balance inside cells, affecting how genes function and how tissues respond.

As climate variability intensifies and extreme heat events become more common, understanding how organisms cope with temperature stress is increasingly important – not only for biology, but for human health, agriculture and ecosystem resilience.

At the core of this challenge is homeostasis – the ability of living systems to remain stable even as their environment changes. In this case, cells do so by adjusting gene activity in response to shifting temperatures.

This raises a critical scientific question: how do diverse species maintain cellular stability under such different environmental conditions?

To answer this question, Florida Atlantic University researchers and collaborators explored how mammalian cells respond to temperature changes at the genetic level. They studied one-humped camels commonly found in hot, arid regions like North Africa and the Middle East, and humans. They focused on skin fibroblasts – cells that help maintain tissue structure – and tracked how gene activity shifts at different temperatures. Camels offered a compelling comparison because their ability to thrive in extreme heat provides insight into biological resilience.

However, a major challenge in this type of research is identifying differentially expressed genes – genes that change their activity in response to environmental stress. Traditional methods for detecting these changes rely heavily on large datasets and statistical testing, which are often not feasible when only a small number of biological samples are available.

To address this limitation, the researchers developed a model that compares how genes behave across individuals before and after an environmental change. Rather than simply tracking whether genes go up or down, it focuses on how consistent the response of each gene is across individuals. Genes that remain steady – or become more consistent across individuals – are identified as key players in helping the body maintain stability under stress, allowing scientists to study these responses even with smaller datasets.

The researchers then grouped genes into a few categories that describe how cells respond to heat and built models of how these genes interact under both normal and stressed conditions, revealing how cells maintain balance even when disrupted.

Results, published in the journal BMC Genomics, found that mammals respond to temperature changes using three main groups of genes that act like a simple system for organizing how cells react to heat. Some genes stay stable and help control the response, others switch on specifically when temperatures change, and a third group becomes more erratic, reflecting stress in the system. This approach allowed the scientists to simplify complex gene activity and better understand how different species cope with environmental changes.

 When comparing humans and camels, the researchers found clear differences. Notably, their measure of cellular well-being showed that camels ranked higher than humans under both moderate (98.6 F) and extreme (105.8 F) temperatures, highlighting their greater tolerance of heat stress.

Human cells tend to respond in a more rigid and tightly controlled way, which can make them less adaptable under heat stress. In contrast, camel cells show a more flexible and coordinated response, allowing them to stay stable even at higher temperatures. Overall, the findings suggest that camels are biologically better equipped to handle heat, while humans are more vulnerable to temperature extremes at the cellular level.

By reducing complex genetic activity into a small set of meaningful patterns, this work offers a new way to understand how cells maintain balance – and why some species are better adapted to survive environmental change.

“This research gives us a fundamentally new way to think about resilience in biological systems,” said Valery Forbes, Ph.D., co-author, professor of biological sciences and dean of FAU’s Charles E. Schmidt College of Science. “By focusing on how gene expression variability changes under stress, we can identify mechanisms that help some species maintain stability while others become more vulnerable. This approach also works with limited data, making it useful for studying how organisms respond to climate shifts and other environmental pressures even when sample sizes are small.”

Beyond temperature adaptation, the framework provides a broader way to understand complex systems. By identifying core patterns of response and interaction, it can be applied to other biological and ecological systems, including how ecosystems, microbial communities and other interconnected networks adapt to changing conditions.

Study co-authors include first author Jorge Gonzalez, Ph.D., a former post-doctoral researcher in the Schmidt College of Science at FAU who worked with Forbes, now at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University; and researchers from FAU, Broad Institute, the University of Minnesota, the University of Florida, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and the San Diego Wildlife Alliance.

This work was funded by a National Science Foundation Understanding the Rules of Life Collaborative Research Grant awarded to Forbes; and co-authors Diane Genereux, Ph.D., Broad Institute; Allyson Hindle, Ph.D., University of Nevada, Las Vegas; and Elinor Karlsson, Ph.D. Broad Institute.

- FAU -

About Florida Atlantic University:

Florida Atlantic University serves more than 32,000 undergraduate and graduate students across six campuses along Florida’s Southeast coast. Recognized as one of only 13 institutions nationwide to achieve three Carnegie Foundation designations - R1: Very High Research Spending and Doctorate Production,” “Opportunity College and University,” and Carnegie Community Engagement Classification - FAU stands at the intersection of academic excellence and social mobility. Ranked among the Top 100 Public Universities by U.S. News & World Report, FAU is also nationally recognized as a Top 25 Best-In-Class College and cited by Washington Monthly as “one of the country’s most effective engines of upward mobility.” To learn more, visit www.fau.edu.

 

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Journal

BMC Genomics

DOI

10.1186/s12864-026-12823-7 

Method of Research

Computational simulation/modeling

Subject of Research

Cells

Article Title

New approaches to discovering epigenetic rules of homeostasis in diverse mammal species

 

‘Fitspiration’ posts may do more harm than good for young adults – international study, led by Olympian, suggests

Researchers call for caution viewing this social media content as it can lead to unhelpful comparisons, unhealthy dieting and exercise, plus negative self-esteem

Taylor & Francis Group

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Social media is filled with posts about fitness and healthy eating aiming to inspire and encourage better lifestyles. However, out today, a new large review study led by an Olympic athlete reveals that this seemingly motivational content can sometimes have unexpected negative impacts on the health and wellbeing of young adults. 

Findings, published in the peer-reviewed journal Health Communication, suggest that even short-term exposure to these posts can have unhealthy consequences, leaving the viewers with reduced self-esteem, feeling unhappy about their looks and potentially having unhealthy motivations around their health and wellbeing. 

The outcomes follow an extensive analysis of 26 studies involving 6,111 individuals aged 18 to 33 years across seven countries, examining how exposure to ‘fitspiration’ content on social media – posts promoting exercise, healthy eating and idealised, toned bodies – affects health-related outcomes. 
 
The research was led by Dr Valerie Gruest, a Guatemalan swimmer who competed at the 2016 Summer Olympics. Dr Gruest is now completing a Ph.D. in the Media, Technology, and Society doctoral program at Northwestern University, in Illinois. 
She has carried out the paper alongside Dr Nathan Walter, an Associate Professor at the university’s School of Communication.  

“Fitspiration content is often framed as positive and health-focused, but our findings suggest it may be more harmful than beneficial for some young adults,” says Dr Gruest, whose research interests focus on how new media shapes attitudes and behaviors. “Even brief exposure can trigger harmful comparisons and reinforce unrealistic body standards, which may undermine self-esteem and encourage more extreme or unsustainable approaches to diet and exercise.” 

Social media use has grown rapidly in recent years, with most young adults now regular users. While these platforms can support connection and self-expression, they can also expose users to idealised standards that encourage comparison and may affect mental health. Fitspiration – often shortened to ‘fitspo’ – is one example of content that appears beneficial but may carry risks. 

With nearly 100 million posts using hashtags such as #fitspiration and #fitspo – and billions of views across platforms like Instagram and TikTok – many young adults are frequently exposed to this content, whether intentionally or not. Despite its popularity, its impact on health and wellbeing remains relatively underexplored. 

“I’ve been fascinated by fitspiration content since my time as an athlete, where it was often held up in elite training environments as the ideal. But even then, I knew those body standards didn’t reflect the reality of training for performance, especially when following a balanced, sustainable diet, even while training for multiple hours a day,” explains Dr Gruest. 
 
“That curiosity has stayed with me as a researcher. I want to better understand how this kind of content is actually impacting people.” 

To investigate the issue further, Drs Gruest and Walter examined data from experimental studies published between 2015 and 2023, mainly in the United States, with others from the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Ireland, Italy and New Zealand. Participants were typically shown 10 to 100 fitspiration images, or videos, and their behavioural and psychological outcomes were compared with those exposed to non-fitspiration content. 

Statistical analysis showed that exposure to fitspiration content led to increased social comparison, poorer body image, more negative emotions, and stronger – sometimes unrealistic – dieting and exercise motivations. These patterns were broadly consistent across gender, age and body mass index, suggesting that the effects may extend beyond the groups most commonly studied, such as young women. 
 
“While I expected some negative effects, I was struck by just how strong and consistent they were,” Dr Gruest states.  
 
“The findings show a pretty concerning pattern, as this kind of exposure can harm both psychological well-being and health behaviours, which makes it all the more important that we keep examining its impact.” 

Dr Walter, whose research specialism concerns the power of strategic storytelling, correction of misinformation, concludes: “This research adds to the growing conversation about the impact of social media on young people’s health and emotional wellbeing, and the role of emotion and affect in social influence.  

“Unlike traditional media, fitspiration delivers a constant stream of highly curated and idealised images, meaning young adults are likely to be repeatedly exposed to this content in their everyday lives. As its popularity grows, understanding the effects of this ongoing exposure will be key to supporting healthier engagement in the future.” 

While a key strength of this analysis is that it includes studies from multiple countries, the authors note some limitations. Participants were largely from developed countries and predominantly women, and reporting on factors such as race, ethnicity and body composition was inconsistent, making it difficult to understand how these effects may vary across more diverse populations.  

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Journal

Health Communication

DOI

10.1080/10410236.2026.2653191 

Method of Research

Meta-analysis

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Lifting the Screen on Fitspiration: A Meta-Analysis

Article Publication Date

4-May-2026

 

New Canadian recommendations aim to make screening for alcohol misuse easier

Canadian Medical Association Journal

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An update to Canadian guidance on screening for high-risk drinking and alcohol use provides streamlined recommendations in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) that authors hope will make it easier for health care professionals to talk to patients about alcohol use​https://www.cmaj.ca/lookup/doi/10.1503/cmaj.251759​.

“Excessive alcohol use frequently underlies many reasons people see their doctor, such as poor sleep or anxiety, but this explanation routinely goes undetected in health care settings,” says Dr. Evan Wood, co-chair of the guideline writing committee and an addiction medicine specialist at the British Columbia Centre on Substance Use and the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC. “These updated recommendations aim to support clinicians with a practical approach to initiating conversations about alcohol use and identifying those with potential problems earlier so patients can receive factual advice and care when needed.”

This guideline is an evidence-based update by the Canadian Research Initiative in Substance Matters (CRISM), funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, to screening recommendations from an earlier CRISM ​guideline​ published in 2023. Research showed many previously recommended tools were impractical and not effective at detecting problematic alcohol use.

The 5 screening recommendations in the guideline update are aimed at helping primary care clinicians and medical professionals in emergency departments and medical wards counsel youth (aged 12 to 25) and adults who may have undiagnosed alcohol problems.

“We developed 5 recommendations to identify and address both risky alcohol consumption and more serious alcohol-related problems, recognizing that patients may exhibit diverse patterns of drinking and risk,” says Dr. Wood. “We hope the easy-to-use tables with tips on how to reduce alcohol use and more will help clinicians focus on patients’ unique needs, allowing them to save time when circumstances allow while focusing on those with identified alcohol problems.”

A team of researchers, clinicians, and people with lived and living experience of substance use from across Canada helped develop the national guideline.

“Despite the burden of alcohol-related harms, there remains a gap between what we know is effective intervention and treatment and the care many patients actually receive,” says Dr. Jürgen Rehm, co-chair of the guideline writing committee and senior scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). “Improving screening in primary care can help intervene in circumstances of excessive drinking and help identify alcohol problems earlier and connect people with effective treatments and supports.”

The authors recommend that screening for alcohol use should be part of conversations between health care providers and patients about the health risks and harms of psychoactive substances overall.

A related editorial ​https://www.cmaj.ca/lookup/doi/10.1503/cmaj.260640​ on youth substance use emphasizes the importance of screening and talking to youth about substance abuse.

“Screening patients for the use of alcohol and other substances is important, but to be effective, a positive screen needs follow-up with intervention,” write Drs. Shannon Charlebois, medical editor, CMAJ, and Shawn Kelly, a pediatrician and addictions medicine specialist at the University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario. “This is particularly important for youth, because the earlier substance use starts, the higher the risk of future misuse and addiction.”

They note that even a short conversation can make a difference, and that anyone who works with adolescents can have an impact.

“Increasingly, addiction medicine experts agree that asking about features of substance withdrawal during a brief intervention can increase its efficacy, because doing so can identify teens for whom substance use is already a substantial problem and prompt appropriate intervention,” write Drs. Charlebois and Kelly.

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Journal

Canadian Medical Association Journal

DOI

10.1503/cmaj.251759 

Method of Research

Literature review

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Screening for high-risk drinking and alcohol use disorder: update of the 2023 national clinical practice guideline

Article Publication Date

4-May-2026

 

Climate warms, but under‐ice water temperatures in lakes can become cooler

University of Eastern Finland

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Long‐term monitoring of several Finnish lake areas demonstrates that autumn conditions indirectly govern winter thermal regimes.

Climate change undoubtedly affects lakes and the functioning of their ecosystems, but seasonal impacts are not always straightforward. An international team of researchers from York University in Canada, the Finnish Environment Institute and the University of Eastern Finland in Joensuu investigated how lake autumn surface warming is associated with winter under‐ice temperatures and ice phenology. The results were published in Water Resources Research. The study synthesised 37–50 years of data since 1971 from dozens of Finnish lake sites that are located across the country.

Warm autumns delay lake freezing, but overall water temperatures in winter can become lower

There was a negative relationship between the timing of ice-on and under-ice bottom water temperatures. In warmer autumns, when lakes freeze later, bottom water temperatures are colder in winter compared to years with cooler autumns and earlier freeze-up. This is one of the main results of the study, and though it may sound counterintuitive, there is a logical explanation. When lakes remain ice-free longer in autumn, they continue to lose heat to the atmosphere. Without the insulating layer of ice cover, mixing continues and more heat escapes before winter begins. As a result, winter water temperatures are colder by the time ice eventually forms. Interestingly, a late ice-on date and an early ice-off date were associated with the subsequent maximum surface water temperatures in summer, however, under-ice bottom water temperatures had no correlation.

Autumn surface waters have become warmer due to climate change

The lake areas included in the study had become warmer during the monitoring period. The researchers found that autumn surface water temperatures had risen by an average of 1.85 °C, and lake freezing had been delayed by 20 days. Strong winds and the amount of shortwave radiation from the sun in autumn, as well as large lake size, were linked to colder under-ice bottom water temperatures.

Until now, the role of autumn in the limnology of dimictic lakes, i.e., lakes that undergo a complete cycle twice a year, has not been properly investigated. Dimictic lakes are typical in many areas of the boreal climate zone, and almost all Finnish lakes are dimictic. The present study is the first large-scale, multi-lake analysis using long-term time series to demonstrate the influence of autumn on lake thermal structure.

“We are only now beginning to understand the significant importance of autumn conditions for northern temperate lakes. Our recent findings should be taken into account in limnological research and climate change impact projections,” say Faith Ferrato, MSc, Dr Joshua Culpepper and Professor Sapna Sharma from York University.

“Water temperature is a key factor that determines the biology of ectothermic aquatic organisms. In very cold water, many organisms, from plankton to fish, often behave more passively. At the same time, temperature has significant effects on, for example, the physiology of organisms,” says Raine Kortet, Professor of Aquatic Ecology at the University of Eastern Finland.

“This study also highlights the importance of long-term hydrological monitoring data when assessing the impacts of climate change on lake hydrology and biology,” adds Merja Pulkkanen, Team Manager at the Finnish Environment Institute.

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Journal

Water Resources Research

DOI

10.1029/2025WR042047 

Article Title

Phenological Shifts in Autumn Drive Changes in Ice-on Timing and Under-Ice Water Temperature in Dimictic Finnish Lakes

 

Wind energy and scenic landscapes: Balancing beauty and power through better planning

ETH Zurich

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Wind turbines supply a particularly large amount of electricity in winter – precisely when demand is high. Nevertheless, expansion is stagnating in many regions of Europe. One of the main reasons is that wind turbines can clash with local scenic landscape and are therefore met with local opposition.

Researchers at ETH Zurich and the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI have systematically analysed this conflict at the European level. Under the direction of Russell McKenna, Professor of Energy System Analysis at ETH Zurich and Lab Head at PSI, they examined how people perceive landscape beauty and how this aspect can be incorporated into wind energy planning. 

“Our aim was to better understand the conflict between energy expansion and social acceptance,” says Ruihong Chen, a doctoral student in McKenna’s group and first author of the study recently published in the journal Energy and AI.

How landscape beauty can be measured

“Beauty is, of course, a highly subjective concept,” Chen adds. In light of this, the researchers trained a machine-learning model using crowdsourced data from Great Britain. The dataset comprises over 200,000 landscape images that users have rated on a scale of 1 to 10. 

The model showed the researchers which landscape features are most strongly associated with perceived beauty. Decisive factors include, for example, the type of land use (e.g. glacial and rocky terrains are classified as most beautiful, while agricultural land and settlement areas rank lowest), the natural quality of the landscape, proximity to water bodies and the amount of sunlight.

In the next step, the researchers applied the model to the whole of Europe. “So far, analyses of this kind have only been carried out for individual countries,” says Chen. Now, for the first time, a machine-learning-based map has been produced showing which regions in Europe are considered particularly beautiful and scenic. 

Less wind energy – but hardly higher costs 

The researchers linked their analysis of landscape quality to a wind energy model. This enabled them to investigate, for the first time, how protecting particularly beautiful landscapes affects wind energy on a large scale. 

The result: excluding especially beautiful and scenic landscapes across Europe would substantially reduce the potential for wind energy. However, the cost per unit of electricity generated would remain close to the European average. 

The reason is that suitable locations with strong, consistent winds that are easily accessible – for example, thanks to existing infrastructure or proximity to the electricity grid – are often outside areas rated as particularly beautiful. A larger share of electricity production could take place there. 

The conflict is evident on the ground 

However, this pan-European approach masks conflicts at the regional level, where notable differences exist. Chen explains: “Especially in hotspots like the Alpine region or Norway, excluding beautiful landscapes would significantly reduce wind power potential.” 

When good locations are eliminated, generation costs rise substantially because the remaining sites tend to be less efficient. “On a regional level, unfortunately, good wind conditions can coincide with beautiful landscapes,” says Chen. Switzerland and the Alps exemplify this conflict: despite strong wind resources, the potential has been underutilised mainly due to landscape conservation concerns. 

Chen adds: "Broad European or national perspectives are insufficient for wind power planning. Our analysis demonstrates that planning must be highly localised to effectively address local conflicts.” 

How tensions can be defused 

Different methods exist to defuse conflicts, one of which is known as micro-siting. This technique involves carefully positioning each wind turbine, allowing scenic areas to be preserved without automatic exclusion. 

“Wind turbines can, for example, be located behind an edge of the terrain or closer to existing infrastructure such as power lines,” says Chen. This significantly reduces the visual impact on the landscape. 

An adapted design could also help make wind turbines less conspicuous and better blend into the landscape. “Bundling installations with existing infrastructure is probably the most socially acceptable way,” says Chen. 

First attempt subject to limitations 

The study is a first attempt at predicting landscape scenic value on a European scale with high spatial resolution and is subject to certain limitations. As the training dataset is biased towards land cover in Great Britain, not all types of European land cover are well represented. 

Further improvements could focus on enriching the training data with locations in other European countries. “For example, we could incorporate social media data to make it even more accurate and robust,” says Chen. 

The findings can already be applied in other areas; for example, in the planning of alpine solar plants, grid expansion or other infrastructure projects. In any case, the study provides an approach to advancing the energy transition without losing sight of the landscape. 

Researchers from the Jülich Research Centre in Germany were also involved in this study.  

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Journal

Energy and AI

DOI

10.1016/j.egyai.2026.100752 

Article Title

Data-driven landscape scenicness mapping for continental-scale onshore wind resource assessment