Exploring Views on Managed Fire or Fire With Benefits or Whatever. I. How Much “Treatment” Is “Needed”? To What End?

 

Let’s talk about MF separately.

For now, I am going to call wildfire managed for resource benefits “managed fire” or MF.  I can’t keep track of what it’s supposed to be called.  I think it was the Wildfire Commission who thought that prescribed fire (PF) and MF should be combined into BF or beneficial fire.   I think that’s not a good idea because they are different in many ways.

If, in fact,  MF is of concern to diverse kinds of people from Sarah Hyden to Frank Carroll, and even Jon and I agree about the need for some kind of environmental analysis (which some forests have) and even plan amendments (!), then I think we need to single out MF for discussion.   As far as I can tell, there are three main camps on MF.

1. Everything is fine.

2. Folks should be able to use it, but we need some kind of pre-planning with analysis and public involvement. We’re not there yet. Let’s talk.

3. Never use MF

Many folks I talk to are in 2 somewhere, and yet somehow there is much discussion between 1 and 3.  So this week, at least until bigger news appears, I thought we might dive deeper into some of the arguments and further see where we agree and disagree.

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 1. How Much Treatment Do “We Need”? Restoration and Changing Fire Behavior Are Not Always the Same Thing

Here’s how one argument seems to go… “we’ll never achieve what “we need to do” with only PF (prescribed fire) and MT (mechanical treatment).”  To me, that first raises questions of  “what is it we really need to do and why?”  There are at least two schools of thought.  One is where fuels practitioners and suppression folks are describing what conditions need to exist where, so that suppression folks can protect key communities and wildlife and watershed values, what we might call “PODs’n’more.”  The other is a more historic ecological view of returning fire to some conditions of sometime in the past, more or less everywhere.  You can see that the latter would cover many more acres than the former. So perhaps, before we decide if PF and MT can fill the bill, we should agree on what “we need.”

Back in 2021, I wrote about these two approaches. The below is from the Defenders of Wildlife letter on Climate Smart Forestry (remember USDA asked for comments).  I call this one “departure first.”

Defenders of Wildlife (Defenders) state in their letter[2] “Rather than characterizing wildfire management as a matter solely of risk reduction, we recommend that a USDA climate-smart policy be based upon the bedrock principles of the Cohesive Strategy and seek to maintain and restore the ecological integrity of fire adapted landscapes; develop fire adapted human communities; and improve effective wildfire response.”

The Cohesive Strategy (2014)[3] never uses those words; the actual wording is: “Landscapes across all jurisdictions are resilient to fire-related disturbances in accordance with management objectives.” (p.3.) A search of the document did not yield the term “integrity.”

Now as you all know, I am a fan of using the term “resilience,” and not so much “integrity”, so I won’t further belabor the point.

Defenders later recommend (p. 17): “Develop planning and decision-making structures and processes that ensure that the highest priority areas within mixed ownership landscapes are addressed first; this would include areas around communities as well as areas that are most degraded and departed from desired reference conditions. “

Meanwhile EDF  what I call the “safety first” approach.

“Our national wildfire strategy should have two priorities: 1) Protect communities in the line of fire; and 2) Reestablish natural fire patterns to protect ecosystem values and sustainably manage fuel loads. Reestablishing natural fire regimes can only be realized when fuel loads, particularly in the West, are greatly reduced using both mechanical treatments and prescribed and managed fire. Implementation will require an updated wildfire triage approach to ensure that we address the most pressing threats to communities and human lives, first.”

My suspicion is that the difference in prioritization never became an issue because priorities in a limited-budget world will always be driven by the need for PODs and community protection.

In her comment here, Susan Jane linked to some scientific papers on the “fire deficit.” At the risk of being even more heretical than usual, I would argue that there is no such thing as a fire-dependent ecosystem.  There are certainly fire-adapted species.. and maybe even fire-dependent species.  I just spent last week reviewing the reestablishment of tree species after glaciation, and it’s easy to think that there is no “ecologically appropriate” vegetation mix other than what happens to survive at any particular space and time (that is the difference between thinking of “ecosystems” versus “current species assemblages”).  Yes, for example, on some soil types true firs or Douglas-fir will grow in and compete with ponderosas that are more fire-resistant, and provide ladder fuels, and later die from budworm or root disease and all those things.  And PF could take care of that, at least after initial MT.  But MF could also kill the pines. From the first paper she cites:

There has been long-standing interest in the scientific community if, and to what degree, contemporary fire regimes are departed from historical reference conditions in terms of fire frequency or annual area burned.

From the abstract of this paper:

We then quantified the degree of fire deficit or surplus for all areas of the western US as the difference between expected (as predicted with the model) and observed area burned from 1984 to 2012. Results indicate that many forested areas in the western US experienced a fire deficit from 1984 to 2012, likely due to fire exclusion by human activities. We also found that large expanses of non-forested regions experienced a fire surplus, presumably due to introduced annual grasses and the prevalence of anthropogenic ignitions. The heterogeneity in patterns of fire deficit and surplus among ecoregions emphasizes fundamentally different ecosystem sensitivities to human influences and suggests that large-scale adaptation and mitigation strategies will be necessary in order to restore and maintain resilient, healthy, and naturally functioning ecosystems.

And finally from a 2018 paper,

Although disturbance legacies contribute to local-scale intensity of drought stress, fire deficits have reduced drought resistance of mixed-conifer forests and made them more susceptible to challenges by pests and pathogens and other disturbances.

Although we used different terminology (true firs came in, and without fire, compete with ponderosas) we actually knew that back in the day (80’s).

It’s kind of a strange way to think about wildfire.. that we want to reestablish “historical reference conditions”.. again, it’s unclear as to whether those conditions are useful information, or have become a target (much like HRV).  I can imagine another study that looks at historic conditions and finds that we also have a bison deficit, or a housing surplus,  or a soybean surplus, or even a Euroamerican surplus and a Native American deficit compared to historic conditions.  And we would say “that’s obvious, so what?”  What if we gave up the idea of historic conditions, and substituted “getting rid of undesirable conditions.” We’d have to articulate why it was undesirable, how much it costs to fix, if it is even possible to fix,  and maybe have a public discussion about different possible goals and values and the likelihood of achieving them.

And studies like this suggest that even if we set HRV as a target, replicating the past would be difficult  or impossible to achieve, and it kind of elides “what was” with “what should be” if we’re not very careful.  Which leaves out the role of climate change as well as other obvious changes since whatever time period is chosen..

historical fire return intervals were longer (20–50+ years) and more heterogeneous with patches (10–100 ha) of stand-replacing and moderate-severity fire (where fire reduces the basal area or canopy cover 20–70%) (Brown et al., 1999, Schoennagel et al., 2011, Sherriff et al., 2014).

If our goal is keeping living trees on the landscape (with some openings and regeneration), we might be careful with stands and use PF (with or without MT as needed) according to prescription.  MF seems like it could be a bit of a bludgeon comparatively,  without some kind of analysis or prescription.  And maybe that happens during the fire- that certain areas have been targeted through some process for certain intensities of fires and the MFs are managed that way-  but needs to be made more transparent.

I remember my old boss, Fred Norbury, then EMC Director, on a field trip on the PSICC somewhere along the Platte River, probably 20 years ago.  Looking at a prescribed fire project (standard MT followed by PF underburning), we were told that PF would need to be redone every 20 years.  You could see the dollar signs in Fred’s eyes.. “you think we can afford to do that on all these acres?” And perhaps the “target” and the “priority” questions are still open.