Prescribed Burning

Fire suppression and other factors have resulted in high wildfire risk in the western US, and prescribed burning can be an effective tool for thinning forests and reducing fuels to lessen wildfire risks. However, prescribed burning sometimes fails to substantially reduce fuels and sometimes damages and kills valuable, large trees.

Prescribed burning is a primary tool for habitat restoration and management in fire-adapted grasslands. Concerns about detrimental effects of burning on butterfly populations, however, can inhibit implementation of treatments.

In fire-prone forests, self-reinforcing fire behavior may generate a mosaic of vegetation types and structures. In forests long subject to fire exclusion, such feedbacks may result in forest loss when surface and canopy fuel accumulations lead to unusually severe fires.

Wildfires emit significant amounts of pollutants that degrade air quality. Plumes from three wildfires in the western U.S. were measured from aircraft during the Studies of Emissions and Atmospheric Composition, Clouds and Climate Coupling by Regional Surveys (SEAC4RS) and the Biomass Burning Observation Project (BBOP), both in summer 2013.

More than 50% of water supplies in the conterminous United States originate on forestland or rangeland, and are potentially under increasing stress as a result of larger and more severe wildfires. Little is known however about the long-term impacts of fire on annual water yield, and the role of climate variability within this context.

The Interagency Fuels Treatment Decision Support System (IFTDSS) is a web-based software and data integration framework that organizes fire and fuels software applications into a single online application. IFTDSS is designed to make fuels treatment planning and analysis more efficient and effective.

In the prairies of the Pacific Northwest, USA, fire has been reintroduced as a tool for reducing non-native, invasive plant cover and promoting the growth and establishment of native plant communities.

Prescribed fire is a primary tool used to restore western forests following more than a century of fire exclusion, reducing fire hazard by removing dead and live fuels (small trees and shrubs).

Fuel reduction treatments are being conducted throughout watersheds of the western United States to reduce hazardous fuels in efforts to decrease the risk of high-severity fire. The number of fuel reduction projects that include near-stream environments is increasing, bringing new challenges to riparian management.

Prescribed fire activity is complex and poorly understood when evaluated at a national scale. Most often fire complexity is defined by scale, frequency, season, and location in the context of local and state laws and localcommunity acceptance.