The Nature Conservancy. Protecting nature. Preserving life.™

Different ecosystems have different responses to fire. In addition, largely as a result of human actions, fires are behaving differently now than they have throughout history. Our fire ecologists use science-based, collaborative assessments to set conservation priorities and to improve our understanding of the role of fire and the underlying causes of fire regime alteration.

Working with partners, we conduct fire assessments at a variety of scales – global, national, regional, state, and individual sites.

• The Global Fire Partnership is a collaborative project between The Nature Conservancy, the World Conservation Union (IUCN), the University of California Berkeley’s Center for Fire Research and Outreach (CFRO), and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). The team completed a global assessment of native fire regimes that documents fire's changing role in global ecosystems, which can be used in decision-making related to biodiversity conservation.
   
• Fire assessments for the Bahamas, the Dominican Republic and a portion of Honduras are complete. Guidelines for working with fire conservation across national boundaries are explained in a Nature Conservancy-produced document, Living with Fire: Sustaining Ecosystems & Livelihoods Through Integrated Fire Management. Another report, Fire, Ecosystems, and People: Threats and Strategies for Global Biodiversity Conservation, explains how the Conservancy approaches working with fire and indigenous people world-wide.
   
• The Nature Conservancy is a major partner in LANDFIRE, a national program that produces geo-spatial products and databases covering the United States. LANDFIRE is a partnership between the Department of the Interior, the U.S. Forest Service and the Conservancy. The partnership has created a nationally complete, comprehensive, and consistent set of products that support fire and natural resource management organizations and applications. Tools and data are used to support large federal wildland fire-related applications, landscape-level conservation planning, regional wildlife studies, ecosystem services, biofuels and national carbon stock and biomass assessments. Find TNC-LANDFIRE on the Conservation Gateway.