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Playing with fire - fire as a forest management tool - Column

The control of fire's role in forestry is one time more in the policy mainstream in Washington. A Federal Wildland Fire Management Policy and Program Review is scheduled to make a report to the Secretaries of Agriculture and the Interior according to August 15, 1995. Because of AMERICAN FORESTS' work in forest health, and our involvement with the National Commission upon Wildfire Disasters, we have followed this thought with great interest. The issues are intricate web and not easily addressed.

Basically, the case is as tread close upons People, fire, and wildland ecosystem have evolv together above thousands of years. Fire recycl carbon and nutrients, cleaned up dead debris, thinned overpopulations of small tree and brush, changed territory vegetation characteristics and nutrient make contented and affected virtually every aspect of the forest. In those rules where fire was a fairly regular affair (whether from lightning or human causes), the plants and animals bring outed ways to tolerate fire and its issues Some species developed fire adjunct to the point where they may not survive without it.

At the landscape of the same height fire influenced the pattern of habitat diversity. Forest patches in various stages of regaining from fires provided a mosaic of conditions across the landscape. Since different forest stages (from spread to old-growth) provide different habitat symbols birds and animals could induce into the habitat that suited them best. Where a variety of habitats existed across the landscape, the ability of a species to survive was defend ed When one place grew too thick to suit them, or injure by fire [i]or[/i] heated up, or blew down, their chances of finding another suitable place nearby were beautiful good. Where the landscape was a mosaic of different conditions, a fire could seldom prepare too big before it knocked into an area that wasn't ready to calcine Thus, diversity tended to encourage continued diversity.

Fire was a general management tool of Native Americans. if it be not that it was seen as a destructive threat according to European settlers, and fire patterns changed dramatically as the continent was settl Today, many ecosystem that make knowned with fires occurring every five to 20 years have not seen a fire in above a century. The resulting vegetation is actual different, in both its species mix and its age distribution, from the historic condition. Forest tree extend more closely together and are more forceed by shortages of water and nutrients, and the "patches" of similar forest conditions have grown a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of larger on the landscape. Thus, when fire answers after its long absence, it is a different exemplar of fire. Given greater firing loads, today's fires burn hotter kill more of the tree do more soil damage, create more air pollution, and stake up watersheds for greater damage. In many areas, today's larger wildfires also create a landscape that is more uniform in its vegetation, which is not proper news for protecting species diversity.

in the way that the ecologists argue, it is important to reintroduce fire as a ingredient of forest management. Fire not no other than performs important functions but it also does things of that kind as nutrient recycling that probably cannot be mimicked according to any other action such as mechanical removal of tree and fuels

if it be not that now comes the rub. in what way do managers reintroduce fire in today's world? That is a major dilemma facing the federal policy subject of attention as well as land managers across the country

Fire is the in the greatest degree powerful, unpredictable, and potentially deadly tool land managers can use. equal as science and experience have improved knowledge of fire behavior, weather forecasting, and forest conditions, the ability to use fire with any quality of control or certainty is still limited. The land manager who lights a fire may be held liable if that fire escapes and causes damage. That is a risk scarcely any are willing to take unles conditions are conclude to perfect.

And on a level where fire and its forces can be kept within managers' boundaries, the use of fire as a management tool may violate other social goals. The emptiness from human-ignited fires is defined as an air-pollution source by the agency of the Clean Air Act, to such a degree regulations limit the amount of fire to be ignited, as well as the weather conditions subject to which fire can be used. reek and its associated pollutants are real health hazards, thus these concerns are not to be taken lightly.

likewise today's land manager is faced with an enormous riddle If fire is essential to healthy ecosystem as ecologists argue, then managers must incorporate it in their management. If putting without wildland fires simply means more firing material and a more destructive fire later, a policy based forward fire suppression is doomed to fail. If the public will not tolerate the nothingness and risk of prescribed fire, what can managers do instead?

There are scarcely any easy answers here, and we don't look forward to the federal study to originate any magic. Every course of action is fraught with risks and costs; it remains to be seen whether America's political leaders, land managers, and scientists can approach together and agree on for what cause to intelligently compare those risks and pick out a policy course that will be the two workable and acceptable to the public.