management

Changes in natural wildfire patterns can cause significant impacts on biodiversity, health, and economies. This has sparked discussions on better fire management. One strategy used by countries is Integrated Fire Management (IFM), with prescribed burning as one of the main tools. Prescribed burns effectively depend on specific burn windows.

Natural resource managers (managers) value and use scientific information to inform their decision-making process in a variety of ways. The scientific information managers use depends on a variety of factors, including the source of the information and ease of access.

Background: To combat losses and threats from fire exclusion and extreme wildfire events, communities in the United States are increasingly self-organizing through locally led Prescribed Burn Associations (PBAs) to plan and implement prescribed burns on private lands.

Pile burning of thinned residues is a critical tool to dispose of fuels and to reduce wildfire risk in overstocked, fire-prone forests globally. However, cost estimates of pile burning are limited.

The national Fire and Fire Surrogate (FFS) study was initiated more than two decades ago with the goal of evaluating the ecological impacts of mechanical treatments and prescribed fire in different ecosystems across the United States.

In the fire-prone and fire-adapted landscape of the Rogue River Basin of southwestern Oregon, communities mobilize to prepare, respond, and recover from wildfire while modifying the current social and ecological system.

Background: Prescribed fires play a critical role in reducing the intensity and severity of future wildfires by systematically and widely consuming accumulated vegetation fuel. While the current probability of prescribed fire escape in the United States stands very low, their consequential impact, particularly the large wildfires they cause, raises substantial concerns.

In many parts of the western United States, wildfires are becoming larger and more severe, threatening the persistence of forest ecosystems. Understanding the ways in which management activities such as prescribed fire and managed wildfire can mitigate fire severity is essential for developing effective forest conservation strategies.

In 2023, all regions of British Columbia (BC) experienced record-breaking fire weather and wildfires, with extreme behavior and social-ecological effects. In total, 2245 wildfires burned 2840 545 hectares. Contemporary wildfires are the culmination of a century of altered human–forest–wildfire relationships, exacerbated by climate change.

As climate warms, trees are expected to track their ideal climate, referred to as ‘range shifts’; however, lags in tree range shifts are currently common.