Editor’s note: Clare Boerigter is the Wilderness Fire Research Fellow at the Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute (ALWRI), part of the U.S. Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station. Clare is working with ALWRI Research Ecologist Dr. Sean Parks and collaborators Dr. Jonathan Long (U.S. Forest Service), Dr. Jonathan Coop (Western Colorado University), Dr. Melanie Armstrong (University of Wyoming), and Dr. Don Hankins (California State University-Chico) to investigate fire management in federal wilderness areas. In this blog, Clare shares a new paper and accompanying StoryMap on the potential of human-ignited fire to restore natural conditions within designated wilderness. Read Clare’s related blog post from earlier this year, Barriers and Opportunities for Wilderness Fire in a Time of Change, here. Blog cover photo credit: USDA Forest Service.
Across America, more than 111 million acres of land have been designated as federal wilderness, comprising more than 800 wilderness areas. Under the 1964 Wilderness Act, these landscapes are protected from developments such as road building, logging and mining, with federal land managers directed to preserve wilderness areas in their natural conditions for generations to come. Today, wilderness represents some of America’s most biodiverse, healthy, and resilient ecosystems. Yet, the exclusion of fire from wilderness over the last 120 years has prompted widespread ecological changes which have made many fire-adapted wilderness ecosystems less resilient to climate change and more vulnerable to severe wildfires.
In a recently published paper in Fire Ecology, our research team used a new framework to demonstrate the substantial, long-term, and negative effects of fire exclusion on fire-adapted wilderness ecosystems. We also presented potential solutions to this problem, including the implementation of active programs of prescribed burning and greater recognition and accommodation of Indigenous cultural burning within wilderness.
- 🔥 Read the paper in Fire Ecology: “Untrammeling the wilderness: Restoring natural conditions through the return of human-ignited fire”
- 🔥 Read the companion StoryMap created for a public audience: “Untrammeling the Wilderness: A Companion Storymap”
Here are 4 key takeaways from our work:
- The exclusion of fire from wilderness over the last 120 years – including the suppression of lightning-ignited fires and the removal of Indigenous cultural burning – demonstrates a clear alteration of historical ecological processes, with cascading negative effects that include substantial changes to fire-adapted forest ecosystems, increased risk of uncharacteristically severe wildfires, and greater vulnerability to fire-driven conversion from forest to shrubland, grassland, or other vegetation types that do not resemble long-standing conditions.
- Intentional burning may be necessary to restore historical fire regimes to certain wilderness landscapes. Such burning also provides opportunities for increased engagement between federal agencies and Tribes seeking to resume practices of cultural burning.
- Despite calls for the use of prescribed fire in wilderness spanning decades, the implementation of intentional human-ignited fire in wilderness continues to face specific and unique barriers and challenges.
- However, some wilderness areas have been able to successfully implement prescribed fire. We provide several examples, including the positive effects of this burning.
Curious to learn more?
There are many exciting and ongoing projects related to wilderness fire management, Indigenous fire stewardship, and fire restoration. Here are a few of the projects and papers we’re reading:
- 🔥 We’re Not Doing Enough Prescribed Fire in the Western United States to Mitigate Wildfire Risk (2019) by Crystal Kolden
“There is considerable evidence in the scientific literature that prescribed fire is the most effective means of reducing the risk of wildfire disasters and increasing ecosystem resilience across much of the US. However, only one primary federal land management agency has substantially increased prescribed fire use… This suggests that a larger cultural shift in public sociocultural perceptions of prescribed fire is needed to truly capitalize upon the utility of prescribed fire and more aggressively reduce wildfire risk. Without such a shift, more catastrophic wildfire disasters are inevitable.”
- 🔥 Returning Fire to the Land: Celebrating Traditional Knowledge and Fire (2017) by Frank Lake et al.
“North American tribes have traditional knowledge about fire effects on ecosystems, habitats, and resources. For millennia, tribes have used fire to promote valued resources. Sharing our collective understanding of fire, derived from traditional and western knowledge systems, can benefit landscapes and people. We organized two workshops to investigate how traditional and western knowledge can be used to enhance wildland fire and fuels management and research… A key conclusion from the workshops is that successful management of wildland fire and fuels requires collaborative partnerships that share traditional and western fire knowledge through culturally sensitive consultation, coordination, and communication for building trust.”
- 🔥 Strategic fire zones are essential to wildfire risk reduction in the Western United States (2024) by Malcolm North et al.
“Enhancing collaboration and knowledge‑sharing with Indigenous communities can play a vital role in gaining agency and public support for strategic fire zones, and in building a narrative for how to rebuild climate‑adapted fire regimes and live within them. Meaningful increases in wildland fire use could multiply the amount of beneficial fire on the landscape while reducing the risk of large wildfires and their impacts on structures and ecosystem services.”
- 🔥 Fire, water, and biodiversity in the Sierra Nevada: a possible triple win (2021) by Scott Stephens et al.
“Reducing the risk of large, severe wildfires while also increasing the security of mountain water supplies and enhancing biodiversity are urgent priorities in western US forests. After a century of fire suppression, Yosemite and Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Parks located in California’s Sierra Nevada initiated programs to manage wildfires and these areas present a rare opportunity to study the effects of restored fire regimes… Modeling suggests that the ecohydrological co-benefits of restoring fire regimes are robust to the projected climatic warming. Support will be needed from the highest levels of government and the public to maintain existing programs and expand them to other forested areas.”
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