Prescribed Fire in Michigan

Trained fire management professionals who have studied fire behavior and fire control techniques conduct the Conservancy’s prescribed burns.
Photo © Jack McGowan-Stinski

Fire as a Management Tool

Re-establishing Fire Regimes

Fire is an essential force that has shaped ecosystems and life forms around the globe for centuries. Over time, ecosystems evolved their own signature fire regime—an imprint of the role of fire in that system, characterized by fire frequency, intensity, severity, duration, size and the season in which it occurs.

Around the world and in Michigan today, the many once-natural fire regimes are no longer natural, throwing into peril ecosystems and human communities alike. Development and fire suppression has stopped fire from moving across the landscape as it once did.

Fire is an essential natural process in fire-dependent ecosystems. These ecosystems are resilient over time to repeated fire. Many plants and animals have evolved to tolerate the periodic sweep of flames, and their reproduction, growth and survival depend on and often thrive on fire effects. Fire continually sets into motion biotic cycling, releasing minerals and nutrients, recycling stems, foliage, bark, and wood of plants, stimulating flowering and fruiting of many plants, triggering the release of seeds, and determining wildlife habitat patterns and populations through the mosaic of habitat created and maintained by periodic fire.

Some fire-dependent ecosystems in Michigan include the prairie fens, sedge meadows and lakeplain prairies of southern Lower Michigan, and the oak savannas and barrens, and jack and red pine forests and barrens in both the Lower and Upper Peninsulas. In the early 1800s, about 2.7 million acres of fire-dependent ecosystems occurred in Michigan. At least one-third of native Michigan plant species are known to occur within Michigan’s fire-dependent ecosystems, with about 25% of these plant species potentially at risk of becoming extinct.

The Nature Conservancy, in Michigan and throughout the United States, uses prescribed burning to return fire as an ecological process, to re-establish fire regimes, and allow fire to continue its vital role. Prescribed burning is the controlled application of fire to the land, used to accomplish a specific conservation or land management goal. The Conservancy’s prescribed burns are conducted by trained fire management professionals who have studied fire behavior and fire control techniques to ensure the safety of each burn crew, nearby residents, and private property. We conduct burns in cooperation with federal, state, and local fire management agencies, as well as with preserve neighbors who want to burn on their own property.