Natural Resource Professionals from China Visit New Hampshire to Study Integrated Fire Management. Jeff Lougee/TNC photo. Dig Deeper Find out how fire plays an important role in the regeneration of species in Songshan National Nature Reserve near Beijing, China. Learn more about the New Hampshire Chapter's Integrated Fire Management efforts in the Ossipee Pine Barrens. Integrated Fire Management at TNC The Nature Conservancy’s Global Fire Initiative is promoting Integrated Fire Management as a conceptual framework for considering and managing fire for the maintenance of sustainable ecosystems and communities. It integrates fire management technologies with the ecological needs of ecosystems and habitats, and with the socio-economic needs of communities that use fire or are impacted by fires.

The New Hampshire Chapter recently hosted a group of natural resource professionals from China at our Green Hills and Ossipee Pine Barrens Preserves as part of the Conservancy’s Global Fire Initiative effort to share knowledge on using fire as an effective habitat management tool. The group, representing a number of Chinese governmental agencies, spent a week in the northeast visiting sites where the Conservancy is using integrated fire management, including the Cape Cod National Seashore in Massachusetts, Albany Pine Bush in New York and Waterboro Pine Barrens in Maine.  Darren Johnson, Applied Fire Ecologist from TNC’s Global Fire Initiative, and Mike Crawford, Fire & Restoration Technician for the Massachusetts Chapter, have traveled with the group along with Lucy Guangzhi of the Conservancy’s China Program, who served as translator.  Also accompanying the group were two United Nations representatives from Rome, Italy who have been working on fire management around the world on behalf of the U.N.

Until recently, China has focused mainly on fighting and suppressing wildfires and not on using fire to achieve ecological goals.  The exception is at one sanctuary where prescribed burning has been used to enhance tiger and elephant habitat.  Understanding that integrated fire management can be used as an effective tool in habitat restoration, China, along with other countries developing similar programs, is looking to The Nature Conservancy as experts in the field.

Jeff Lougee, the New Hampshire Chapter’s Director of Stewardship and Ecological Management, led the group on a hike up Peaked Mountain to view the fire dependent red pine/rocky summit woodland community at the Green Hills Preserve in North Conway.  Although the Chapter is not using prescribed fire as a management tool here, it serves as an example of how to begin thinking about and planning for an ecosystem’s need for fire and natural disturbance.

To see the effects of integrated fire management in action, Jeff brought the visitors to the Ossipee Pine Barrens Preserve in Madison.  Prescribed burning has been effectively used here over the past two summers and provides valuable lessons for developing a successful program: how to use fire in the wild land/urban interface – managing fire around homes and communities, and how to manage fire-intolerant tree species (such as white pine) that are encroaching into the canopy.

A video notebook of the tour is being produced by Mike Crawford to preserve the lessons and goals of the trip and will be given to the participants to aid them as they develop their own integrated fire management program to address fire-related issues in China.