In the first few months of 2026, major wildfires have scorched over a million acres of land across Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma. Wildfire experts warn that the Great Plains region will continue to face greater fire danger than past decades as hot and dry conditions persist.
The early 2026 blazes raged for days due to high winds, low humidity and drought conditions, burning grazing pastures, cropland, homes and farm structures. Over 800,000 acres burned in Nebraska alone, a record for the state, with one blaze in mid-March, the Morrill Fire, accounting for over 600,000 acres. In February, a wildfire that crossed the northwest border of Oklahoma into Kansas burned nearly 300,000 acres.
Another outbreak of fires burned more than 9,000 acres in Nebraska last week.
The amount of Great Plains land burned by wildfires tripled between 1985-1994 and 2005-2014, according to a 2017 study from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The number of incidents also increased from 33 per year to 117 per year on average.
Bill Waln, the state fire management officer for the Kansas Forest Service, expects that trend to continue.
“What we're seeing today is significantly different, I can tell you, and I've been in wildland fire management for almost 40 years,” Waln said.
He said living with wildfire risk will require landowners and public officials to reevaluate prevention methods, make emergency plans and fund disaster response.
“We're not ever going to get rid of fire. We can't do it,” Waln said. “But we need to be able to be resilient and bounce back after we have a large, devastating fire and keep the landscape stable and productive.”
Wildfire weather
Gary McManus is a climatologist at the Oklahoma Climatological Survey, housed at the University of Oklahoma. He said low humidity, warm temperatures and high winds are the riskiest conditions for wildfires.
“When those wildfire conditions are in that area, especially the wind, it really can just burn uncontrolled,” McManus said.
These conditions are becoming more extreme due to climate change. Multiple days of warm, dry and windy conditions can cause rapid spread of wildfires and make them difficult to fight.
McManus said natural weather variability — such as La Niña conditions in the Pacific Ocean — has also contributed to many consecutive years of wildfire conditions.
“[La Niña] brings us warmer and drier than normal conditions during the cool seasons, and that's wildfire season,” McManus said. “We've seen those La Niñas occur more often than not over the last 15 to 20 years, and so that's also helping produce those more favorable wildfire conditions.”
Drought conditions also create more fuel for wildfires, said Brian Fuchs, a climatologist for the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The Great Plains region — and most of the western and southern United States — has been dealing with drought for weeks.
“Drought definitely enhances that risk because it allows that fuel to dry out, meaning that if we're seeing drought expand and increase in a region, it typically means that those fuels are also drying out and becoming more susceptible to fire,” Fuchs said.
The proliferation of the invasive eastern red cedar has created another volatile fuel source, said Fuchs.
Dry soil also loses its healthy components, making it more susceptible to drought. Though drought can proliferate wildfires or make it hard to conduct prescribed burns, Fuchs said that burning land can often make plant life grow back stronger.
“Without rains, it's going to be slower for that grassland to green up, but in the long run, the grass itself will be healthier,” Fuchs said.
Fighting fire with fire
Fire has long been a natural feature of the Great Plains.
“Historically, from southern Canada to the Texas-Mexico border was tall grass prairie,” said Dirac Twidwell, a rangeland ecologist and professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “A third of that would have burned on average every year.”
Much of the land in Nebraska that burned was part of the Sandhills region, home to rich, sandy soil largely used as grazing land. Historically, wildfires would naturally burn the landscape.
“The buds are protected below ground from fire, and then as that rain occurs and the moisture happens, they start shooting back up above the ground and recovering more rapidly than any other major vegetation type,” Twidwell said.
It’s only within the last century that humans’ relationship with fire has changed, said Twidwell. Native people living on the Plains used fire in a similar manner to prescribed burns of today, which helped clear away dead vegetation that could act as fire fuel, Twidwell said.
But as the plains were colonized and the population grew, the shift toward industrialized society greatly lessened the role of fire on rangelands. Every wildfire was to be extinguished as quickly as possible — an unrealistic solution that often increased wildfire risk.
“We continue to lose that battle with a lack of fire,” Twidwell said. “We start seeing more and more volatile fuels coming through.”
There are also now more wildfires sparked by humans, said Waln with the Kansas Forest Service. A broken power line, a welding torch or a chainsaw cutting down a tree can all cause sparks.
“These fires that we experienced were not naturally caused fires,” Waln said. “They were human activity caused fires. So we have to make some tough decisions in the future."
Prevention moving forward
Balancing drought and warm, dry conditions with the benefits of fire can be tough for those managing land on the Great Plains, Twidwell said. He said land workers and public officials need affordable, realistic prevention methods and solutions, especially as agriculture producers face high input costs and low selling prices.
“In the end, we have to have workable, practical solutions that take that knowledge and put it in play, and that takes buy-in to do that at scale,” Twidwell said. “Without funding that reinforces that, without priorities that reinforce it, it always lags behind new problems. So we view it as a transition phase.”
Some solutions — such as prescribed burning — are already conducted by many farmers and ranchers. Prescribed burns have helped block fire from spreading, including during Nebraska’s 128,000-acre Cottonwood Fire in March.
“There was a network of recent prescribed burns that were anchored to as part of the wildfire and suppression efforts,” Twidwell said. “There's discussions of where that helped save some houses in that location.”
State and private landowners burned over 7.9 million acres in prescribed fires in 2020, according to a report from the National Association of State Foresters and Coalition of Prescribed Fire Councils. Federal land management agencies burned 1.4 million acres.
Other prevention methods may take some larger sacrifices, Waln said. For example, many western, fire-prone states shut off power lines to prevent fires on windy days if they blow over.
“We as citizens are going to have to talk about whether we're going to be willing to accept having our power shut off for 24 hours or 36 hours, or however long it takes,” Waln said.
As the Great Plains region adjusts to growing fire danger, Waln said increasing local and state preparedness may be challenging in Kansas and Nebraska.
Both states operate their forest service agencies through universities, unlike most others, which are state-operated agencies. The Kansas and Nebraska forest services receive 80% and 60% of their respective funding from the federal government — and cuts could be on the way.
“Quite honestly, it's the iceberg, and we're the Titanic,” Waln said. “It would be the end of who we are, unless the state came in and picked up that additional funding interest.”
Waln also said collaboration across state and county lines will become more necessary to connect areas becoming affected by wildfires at higher rates, especially as many local fire departments need more volunteers.
“We're losing people who want to be part of something bigger than themselves, and the demand is only increasing,” Waln said. “It's such a stress to the system right now. “
About half of Americans live in areas served by volunteer fire departments, and 80% of the country’s fire departments are either all or mostly composed of volunteers, according to the National Fire Protection Agency. Though calls to these departments have increased, the volunteer base has declined by more than a quarter since 2008.
In his nearly 40 years on fire management and response teams, Waln said it’s been encouraging to see how people step up during a crisis.
“It's sad to know that they have to do it, but they come together, they put their differences aside and they get things done,” Waln said. “They help each other out. That's such a rewarding, rewarding experience.”
This story was produced in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest and Great Plains. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues.
