Prescribed Burning

Questions: Wildfire is a natural disturbance that shapes vegetation characteristics worldwide, while prescribed fire is increasingly used to modify vegetation composition and structure. Due to invasion of many ecosystems by exotic species, a concern of land managers is whether wildfire and prescribed fire alter plant communities in favour of exotics.

While many ecosystems depend on fire to maintain biodiversity, non-native plant invasions can enhance fire intensity, suppressing native species and generating a fire–invasion feedback.

Mechanical mastication is a fuel management technique that disrupts the vertical continuity of forest fuels by shredding of trees and understory vegetation into a highly compacted surface fuel bed.

Under a rapidly warming climate, a critical management issue in semiarid forests of western North America is how to increase forest resilience to wildfire.

Fuel treatment effectiveness is often evaluated with fire behavior modeling systems that use fuel models to generate fire behavior outputs. How surface fuels are assigned, either using one of the 53 stylized fuel models or developing custom fuel models, can affect predicted fire behavior.

Evaluating the influence of observed daily weather on observed fire-related effects (e.g. smoke production, carbon emissions and burn severity) often involves knowing exactly what day any given area has burned.

Climate change effects on forested ecosystems worldwide include increases in drought-related mortality, changes to disturbance regimes and shifts in species distributions. Such climate-induced changes will alter the outcomes of current management strategies, complicating the selection of appropriate strategies to promote forest resilience.

A White Paper developed by Association for Fire Ecology, International Association of Wildland Fire, Tall Timbers Research Station, and The Nature Conservancy.

Models of fire behavior and effects do not always make accurate predictions, and there is not enough systematically gathered data to validate them. To help advance fire behavior and fire effects model development, the Joint Fire Science Program is helping fund the RxCADRE, which is made up of scientists from the U.S.

On 28 September 2009, the Naches Ranger District on the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest in south-central Washington State ignited an 800-ha prescribed fire. Later that afternoon, elevated PM2.5 concentrations and visible smoke were reported in Yakima, Washington, about 40 km east of the burn unit. The U.S.