Exploring Views on Managed Fire or Fire With Benefits or Whatever. II. What’s Natural Anymore, Disturbance Processes and Regional Variation

The below came in as a comment from Anon.r.one, and I thought I would post it instead and also place it “in conversation,” as they say, with Jim Zorne’s and my own comments.

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From anon.r.one:

I’m going to preface this comment with the recognition that managed fire may not be advisable in all locations or ecosystems, but that in some ecosystems it may be a (the) critical disturbance feature to maintain said ecosystem. As usual, the thrust of my comment will come from a wilderness perspective although the original post addresses a more managed space.

I want to reject the notion that managed fire should be “managed for resource benefit.” First, and maybe to Sharon’s broader point, I find the idea that we can determinatively state that the fire is beneficial to a resource to be classically hubristic. Every fire will have winners and losers at various spatial and temporal scales and who are we to make that declaration. However, we should also recognize that fire played an integral role in creating and managing that ecosystem.

In large landscapes (Wilderness), fire is managed to ‘allow fire to play its natural role on the landscape.’ I prefer this statement to ‘resource benefit’ as there is an implicit understanding that there may be negative outcomes in some places for some species for some time, but the larger natural process itself is more important in regulating the ecosystem. To quote a Forest Plan, “fire managers strive to manage the natural role of fire while protecting values from adverse impacts of fire,” and “wilderness areas provide opportunities for visitors to experience natural ecological processes and disturbances with a limited amount of human influence.”

To Jim’s point about Region 8, what is fire’s “natural role” when it was used as a tool by Native Americans?  What does “natural” mean in situations where fire suppression occurred and with climate change (many believe that cc is unnatural)? If R8 doesn’t seem to need MF, is that for a practical reason (too many cabins), a cultural/historical reason, a Native American practice reason, or an “ecological” reason?  We can tell from the House FOFA that white oak regeneration is in trouble (and that white oak has fans in the House), and yet the solution is not thought to be MF.

I think it is appropriate to use ‘beneficial’ when describing prescribed fire as fire itself is being used to attain some specified objectives. I’m in agreement with Sharon in keeping prescribed fire and managed fire separate when considering benefits.

You can put me down for the 1.5 camp. There are areas where managed fire is fine (the discussion and analysis has already happened) and areas where there needs to be more discussion. I’m also on board with PODs’n’more, for now. For my WUI areas, I favor mechanical treatment followed by prescribed fire and subsequent maintenance burning. https://research.fs.usda.gov/firelab/projects/lubrecht#overview

My goal would be to have enough treatments that ignitions in specified locations would be permitted to come to existing treatment boundaries.

There’s also some thought that perhaps the HRV doesn’t matter as much as the Future Range of Variability (FRV). “The HRV can still play a role by providing insight into how adaptive traits align with changing disturbance regimes to confer adaptive resilience, but under the FRV the safe operating space is shifting.” https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1617464114

That piece was a op-ed by scientists..  “Wildfires across western North America have increased in number and size over the past three decades, and this trend will continue in response to further warming. As a consequence, the wildland–urban interface is projected to experience substantially higher risk of climate-driven fires in the coming decades. ”

Also they seem to be from the “we’ll have to let fires run through communities” camp ..from the paper:

Key aspects of an adaptive resilience approach are (i) recognizing that fuels reduction cannot alter regional wildfire trends; (ii) targeting fuels reduction to increase adaptation by some ecosystems and residential communities to more frequent fire; (iii) actively managing more wild and prescribed fires with a range of severities; and (iv) incentivizing and planning residential development to withstand inevitable wildfire.

It’s odd to me that these folks are from Colorado, where we a) spend many fed and state dollars on fuel reduction, b) fire tends not to be “more frequent” because it takes a long time for trees to grow back, and c) even with building codes, people would prefer not to have fires running through their communities and have to evacuate. Anyway, back to Anon.R. One:

Mike really nails down some of my thoughts with this comment, “I was personally involved with suppressing several small fires in this zone. What if we had managed some of those fires instead?” I echo his sentiment; it is interesting to reflect on fires personally suppressed and quashed over the years that have been burned over by subsequent large fires. How large would that original suppressed fire have grown with the retroactive knowledge that heavy rain would come in a week or two? Would that unknown burned patch have moderated or even stopped the subsequent fire?

And that is one of the key questions.. will conditions continue to be favorable, or more favorable than future conditions might be?  That’s a tough one.

We can put out fires while the conditions allow for it (in cooler and wetter years) and with lots of resource availability. But when we get into hotter and drier years, it doesn’t matter what we do once the fuels attain a certain dryness, and we are left with only the catastrophic 97th percentile fires. I think most people agree that we don’t want only the 97th percentile fire on the landscape. This is where I see the benefits of managed fire (and not following a 10am guideline), letting those fires burn in the cool and wet years to allow for more heterogeneity on the landscape in preparation for the years that we can’t control anything. (I thought about adding this to the Chief’s letter commentary but refrained for clear reasons).

Obviously, managed fire of this type can only be applied in certain areas with appropriate natural or man-made features, and which have previously been analyzed for the effects of fire. Quoting from a Forest Plan again, “fire is a primary ecological process that has shaped and maintained forest and non-forest ecosystems that in turn sustain the native plant communities and animal species.”

Many thanks for your thoughts, Mike, Jim and Anon.r.one!