Communicating about Fire

For many thousands of years, aboriginal peoples worldwide used fire to manage landscapes. In NorthAmerica, the frequency and extent of fire (both human caused and natural) were much reduced afterEuropean colonization. Fire exclusion became the policy in the United States for most of the 20thcentury as the country became more settled and industrialized.

A key problem reported by the fuels treatment planning community is the difficulty and inefficiency of evaluating and then applying many planning tools and applications.

The Joint Fire Science Program (JFSP), in partnership with the Association for Fire Ecology,offers Graduate Research Innovation (GRIN) awards yearly to a handful of top-quality graduatestudents conducting research in fire science.

Describing the 2013 summer fire season, the Oregon Department of Forestry called it “epic.” On those lands protected by the state, it was the costliest ever, and the first time in over 60 years that more than 100,000 acres burned. Oregon’s forests are changing. The management objectives and priorities of federal and private landowners are evolving.

During the past two decades, land managers and community leaders in the West have adopted sustainable land management methods to make forests healthier, and to maintain profitable local businesses that are beneficial to their communities.

The Ashland Forest Resiliency Stewardship Project has released “Fire for Water,” a 10-minute video (produced by Jon Schwedler, Darren Borgias and Chris Chambers) on the treatment work being done to protect the city of Ashland’s watershed. Some of the work in this multi-partner collaborative project is being supported by SPER funding, and the NW FLN is one of the co-sponsors of the video.

This sourcebook provides answers from the field— strategies and tools that some collaborative resource management groups have used to systematically evaluate their work and adapt plans and management actions based on what they have learned.