The National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy is a collaboration effort involving federal and state agencies, local governments, tribes, and interested stakeholders throughout the nation to improve coordination across the various jurisdictions for managing wildfire. Read more at Fire Facts: What is? The National Cohesive Strategy
The impacts of escalating wildfire in many regions — the lives and homes lost, the expense of suppression and the damage to ecosystem services — necessitate a more sustainable coexistence with wildfire. Climate change and continued development on fire-prone landscapes will only compound current problems.
Changes in land use and management practices throughout the past century–in addition to drought and other stressors exacerbated by climate change–have degraded the nation’s forests and led to overgrowth and accumulation of hazardous fuels (GAO 2015). Because of these fuels, some forests now see high-severity fires that threaten communities as well as important natural and cultural resources.
Fire adaptation is about more than pre-fire work. It’s also about considering the needs of a community and the land post-fire. In Washington State, the last several fire seasons have given communities lots of opportunities to learn about post-fire recovery.
The Available Science Assessment Project (ASAP) leads, EcoAdapt and Oregon State University’s Institute for Natural Resources, hosted a workshop during the International Association of Wildland Fire’s 5th Fire Behavior and Fuels Conference, in cooperation with the Northwest Fire Science Consortium and the Northern Rockies Fire Science Network.
For this study, researchers conducted 54 key informant interviews across the 11 western states to investigate policy-relatedbarriers to prescribed fire on federal lands. In particular, they examined how laws, policies, and policy implementationaffect prescribed fire application, and identified common challenges to and opportunities for increasing application.
The Palouse Prairie is a highly endangered ecosystem found along the Idaho–Washington border. The Palouse Prairie intermixes with the imperiled ponderosa pine savanna along this border, making the ecotone between these communities particularly diverse and ecologically important. Unfortunately, like many grassland and savanna communities across North America and the world, this rich prairie–pine ecotone is now highly fragmented and degraded.
Management strategies developed for Turnbull NWR call for the integration of a variety of techniques to restore natural stand conditions, reduce hazard fuels and improve wildlife habitat. These strategies include various types of thinning followed by the application of prescribed fire.
In August 2007, the Milepost 17 and Wautoma fires burned a combined total of 77,349 acres (31,302 hectares) of the Fitzner-Eberhardt Arid Land Ecology Reserve (ALE), part of the Hanford Reach National Monument administered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) Mid-Columbia National Wildlife Refuge.