Drought raises the stakes of New Hampshire’s relationship to fire

This spring has been a busy one for New Hampshire’s wildland firefighters. 

The drought that made last summer the driest in 130 years has kept soils and forests parched into this spring, the conditions contributing to wildfires that have burned dozens of acres in central New Hampshire to the North Country in recent weeks.

The drought is emblematic of the effects of climate change on weather patterns in the Northeast, experts say. And as severe weather events, including periods of drought, become more extreme, New Hampshire will likely have to contend with more fire-friendly conditions into the future. But just how that will shape the state and its relationship to wildfire, experts said, will depend on how we manage fire and forests going forward.

Drought compounds fire risk

Data provided by New Hampshire Forest Protection Bureau Chief Steven Sherman reaching back to 2021 shows that the number of wildfires the bureau has recorded in the state has increased almost every year since then.

There aren’t enough years of data logged to say yet whether that trend is indicative of a larger-scale increase in the amount of fire on the landscape, said Chris Guiterman, a dendrochronologist and climate scientist based in Hanover. But it is evident that the prevalence of fire-friendly conditions is increasing as droughts become more intense.

Drought in late summer and fall has become a trend in New Hampshire over the past decade, New Hampshire State Climatologist Mary Stampone told the Bulletin in an interview last October, at the close of New Hampshire’s driest summer on record.

This is despite the fact that climate change is causing more precipitation to fall in New Hampshire on the whole. Though we are seeing more rain on an annual basis, it is falling less evenly throughout the year, leading to long periods of drought like what began in summer 2025.

This can lead to “flash drought” conditions that can descend quickly and create significant problems for firefighters, Sherman said. What wildland firefighters saw in New Hampshire during last summer’s record drought was an example of how dry conditions can impact the incidence of wildfires and make them harder to extinguish.

Spring and fall are typically busy times for wildfires. During summer, leaves help suppress flames by adding water vapor to the air around them and shielding the forest floor from sunlight. But last year’s drought counteracted that effect, causing summertime wildfires to increase in New Hampshire, Sherman said. The fires were able to burn deeper into the dry soil, too, in some cases requiring firefighters to spend days digging out burning areas to extinguish the fire.

Drought also constricts the supply of water available for firefighting, Sherman said. For wilderness fires, firefighters must find a water source nearby and carry in equipment. In times of drought, when water sources are depleted, they may have to travel further to find enough water.

But while drought conditions can worsen wildfires, they don’t necessarily make them more common, Guiterman said. Even if all the conditions for a blaze are met, flames won’t rise without a source of ignition. And in 9 of every 10 wildfires in the U.S., a human is behind that cause, Sherman said. That makes awareness and prevention crucial to mitigating fire risk, he said.

Fighting wildland fires

Of the many risks of wildfires, the New Hampshire Forest Protection Bureau considers the danger to homes and recreation the most significant, Sherman said. Many New Hampshire homes are surrounded by “flammable wildland fuels,” making it a yearly occurrence that wildfires approach or destroy structures. Ten structures were threatened by wildfires in 2025, he said. 

A network of people across the state work to combat forest fires, including about 5,200 fire wardens and deputy wardens; an appointed forest fire warden in every town, who notifies the Forest Protection Bureau of fires as they arise; local fire departments; and 11 forest rangers with the bureau whose jobs include fire prevention and suppression. Seasonal staff including wildfire patrol specialists and fire lookout personnel also join the effort during busy seasons; the bureau has 15 operational fire lookout towers, which are staffed at times of peak risk. At especially risky times, the Civil Air Patrol also helps keep watch.

Even with a robust statewide network, total suppression of forest fires might not be possible — or even advisable. Historically, New Hampshire’s forests have had a closer relationship with fire than they do today, and were healthier for it, according to Guiterman. 

Guiterman and his colleagues study tree rings and soil cores to map and chronicle the history of fire in forests around the nation. The Northeast doesn’t have as much of a history of fire as other drier regions do, he said. But nonetheless, in the course of his work, Guiterman has been surprised to discover that our relationship to fire was closer than scientists once believed. 

“It’s more extensive than, you know, I ever thought, coming through a forestry degree and everything,” Guiterman said. “I didn’t think there were really any fire dependent ecosystems in the Northeast, but that’s not the case.”

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Historic wildfires encompassed much more of the forestlands of New Hampshire than they are typically allowed to today, he said, and their presence helped keep the forests biodiverse and thriving.

In addition to naturally arising burns, Indigenous people also used fire to manage the landscape and preserve beneficial ecosystems, including pitch pine and blueberry barrens. Many Abenaki place names point to the historic prevalence of fire at a location, Guiterman said.

But colonization changed how fire is handled in the Northeast. The state adopted fire suppression as its primary management technique in 1909, and the state’s fire pattern changed suddenly as a result, Guiterman said. 

Some entities, including the New Hampshire Department of Fish and Game, continue to conduct controlled burns at some conservation areas to preserve fire-adapted habitats and the species that depend on them, such as the Karner blue butterfly. But on the whole, for the last century or so, New Hampshire has seen far less fire than it once did — and our ecosystems are shifting as a result, Guiterman said. 

“Around here, when we remove fire from an ecosystem, the ecosystem changes really fast,” Guiterman said. The area may become more flammable in the long term, as dry fuels build up. The character of the forest will also shift, with biodiversity shrinking as fire-dependent plants and the animals that depend on them lose hold. Other species, like red maple, then move in quickly, choking out fire-dependent neighbors. 

“So they’re losing the battle to other species, even though they have this embedded history of hundreds of years,” Guiterman said. That process is playing out now in some areas of New Hampshire.

One of those is the Green Hills Preserve, in the Mount Washington Valley, where red pine stands are interspersed in denser, more humid forest, recalling in patches the ecosystem that was once more common in the region.

Preserving fire-adapted landscapes helps boost biodiversity, Guiterman said. And these types of ecosystems also tend to be more climate-resilient, able to handle the hot, dry conditions that we will see more of as climate change progresses. 

Managing for the future

The changing conditions we see on the ground now in New England call for proactive management, Guiterman said.

He pointed to forested landscapes in other states, such as rainforests of the Western United States once called “asbestos forests” for their resistance to fire. Climate change has seen that change, with many of those landscapes no longer immune to wildfire. Guiterman said the Northeast might take a lesson from those regions’ experiences and take proactive management steps with our forests now, before the danger grows.

“Are we in a time period now where, if we did actually start thinking about fuels management and using fire as a tool, could that save us in 10, 20, 30 years from a lot of risk and danger of wildfires like we see out West?” Guiterman asked. It’s hard to say, he said, but he hopes communities will err on the side of caution.

A proactive approach might look like controlling and removing dry, loose fuels, like dead brush and leaves, from around homes. It could also involve a broader application of the controlled use of fire, Guiterman said. Controlled burns can reduce the risk of unplanned wildfires by removing fuels from the landscape. They can also restore the beauty of traditional fire-adapted ecosystems.

Some communities, like Henniker, have worked on “community wildfire protection plans,” Guiterman said. These plans chart a path for a whole town to collaboratively reduce fire risk with prevention methods like controlled burns and fuel reduction. 

Down the line, “those kinds of treatments could really pay dividends to protecting that community from fire,” Guiterman said.

Keeping roofs and gutters clear and maintaining a green-space buffer around your home, clear of flammable, dry fuels, are important steps to keep homes protected from wildfire, Sherman said. He emphasized that fire permits are required for nearly all outdoor fires, even camp and cooking fires in fire rings, at any time there is not snow on the ground. 

Successfully navigating evolving fire risks in New Hampshire will require us to change our culture around fire, and view it simultaneously as a serious concern and a useful and important tool, Guiterman said. 

“I think it would be really nice to see some fire in these ecosystems, to prescribe fire in these ecosystems that we know are adapted to it and are losing out because of the lack of it,” he said. “… Fire demands respect, and it’s something we have to be very careful about applying more broadly, but I think we’re on the right track.”