Public land managers are asked to minimize fuel levels after fires, including using techniques such as salvage logging. They are also responsible for maintaining suitable wildlife habitat, especially for species of concern to state and federal agencies.
Dry forests throughout the United States are fire-dependent ecosystems, and much attention has been given to restoring their ecological function. As such, land managers often are tasked with reintroducing fire via prescribed fire, wildland fire use, and fire-surrogate treatments such as thinning and mastication.
The Fire and Fire Surrogate (FFS) project is a large long-term metastudy established to assess the effectiveness and ecological impacts of burning and fire “surrogates” such as cuttings and mechanical fuel treatments that are used instead of fire, or in combination with fire, to restore dry forests.
Northern spotted owls are known to spend time in areas burned by wildfire, but there has been little scientific investigation of how and why they use these landscapes.
Many scientists and forest land managers concur that past fire suppression, grazing, and timber harvesting practices have created unnatural and unhealthy conditions in the dry, ponderosa pine forests of the western United States. Specifically, such forests are said to carry higher fuel loads and experience fires that are more severe than those that occurred historically.
In forests, high-severity burn patches — wherein most or all of the trees are killed by fire — often occur within a mosaic of low- and moderate-severity effects.