Public lands agencies have committed to substantially increasing their use of tools like prescribed fire to reduce the risk of extreme wildfire. But for now, their scale pales in comparison to wildfire itself, which can have similar mitigating effects when it’s less intense. A new study has insights into those effects across the West.
For understandable reasons, high-severity, destructive wildfires are of great interest to the public and researchers. But most wildfire in the West is low- to medium-intensity. Claire Tortorelli – a former postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Davis and the study’s – said those wildfires “do a lot of good work.”
“In some areas that effect is lasting 10, 20, maybe even longer than 30 years as far as moderating future fire severity,” she added.
Similar effects have been found by other researchers at a smaller scale, but Tortorelli’s team looked at hundreds of wildfires and subsequent re-burns across the American West.
The findings have a number of policy implications. For one, Tortorelli says that managers can help extend the moderating impact of lower intensity wildfires by doing fuels treatments in their wake. The study also lends support to efforts to allow some wildfires to burn when it can be done safely.
Tortorelli noted that in California, the acreage burned by less intense wildfires was several times greater than the area treated with prescribed fire or other policies.
Such wildfires, she said, “can have this positive effect at a scale that we are just incapable right now of meeting with prescribed fire” and other policies.
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Colorado and KANW in New Mexico, with support from affiliate stations across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
