The Nature Conservancy in Washington

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Prescribed Burns, (click to enlarge).

Go Deeper

The Nature Conservancy works in many landscapes to maintain fire's natural role. Learn more about our fire initiative here.

In Washington, the Conservancy has a robust fire management program. Learn more about fire and conservation in our state in a Q&A with Betsy Bloomfield, the Conservancy's South Central Washington Program Director.

Where We Work

Only three percent of our native prairies remain. Learn more about how we work in the South Puget Sound Prairies.

The Conservancy also conducts prescribed fires at the Tieton River Canyon preserve. Click here to find out more about this beautiful place.

The Yellow Island Preserve is another area in which we work where prescribed burns are vital to the health of the landscape.

The Nature Conservancy conducts prescribed burns as a tool to restore prairies in many areas where we work. In Washington, wild blue-eyed Mary, camas, and chocolate lilies will be budding on the prairies of Fort Lewis next spring, thanks to a prescribed burning program carried out this fall.

A Landscape Shaped by Fire

The Puget Sound prairies are a landscape shaped by fire. Native peoples used fire to maintain open prairies and oak woodlands, where they gathered plants for food and medicine and hunted elk and deer drawn by the lush new growth that followed the fires.

But our prairies have suffered from more than a century of fire suppression, which has allowed Douglas-firs and Scotch broom to creep in, cover the wildflowers, and smother the oaks. The Conservancy and its many partners in the south Puget Sound have taken on the challenge of returning fire to this urbanizing landscape.

What the Conservancy is Doing

Twelve Conservancy staff members in the south Puget Sound office were recently certified as firefighters to enable us to support prescribed burning on Fort Lewis’s native prairie landscape as well as other prairie preserves in the region. The Conservancy assisted at two controlled fires at Fort Lewis in late August, and plans are in the works for as many as 20 more this fall.

The payoff will come in the spring, when the land bursts forth in new wildflowers.

Nature picture credits (top to bottom, left to right): Photo © Mason McKinley/TNC (prescribed fire); Photo © Jen Molnar/TNC (wildflowers).