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Abstract
In the United States, wildfires have grown significantly in the past three decades. Therefore, wildfire management agencies like the United States Forest Service (USFS) are spending more to manage these fires. This study conducted a comprehensive review and used time series analysis to investigate: (1) the variables associated with increased suppression costs and (2) the seasonal trends of suppression costs and the influence of climatic and socio-environmental variables, in order to capture and understand the complex dependencies within the climatic and socio-environmental variables and suppression expenditures. However, a comprehensive review indicated that large fires (LF) and WPL (Wildfire Property Loss) have a positive correlation and the suppression expenditure, Niño 3.4 SST, NAO, and LF indicate seasonality. A positive dependency was observed between LF and SOI with suppression expenditure for USFS. This study suggests modeling suppression expenditure on the appropriate temporal scale to predict and understand different variables’ impacts on expenditure.