New Research: How Wildfires Can Be Leveraged to Increase Forest Resilience

New research from The Nature Conservancy (TNC), the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) and the USDA Forest Service (USFS), published in the journal Forest Ecology and Management, details how wildfires could be leveraged to increase forest resilience to future high-severity fires across the Western United States.

Wildfires can be a powerful regenerative force for nature. However, modern wildfires in forests across the Western U.S. have become uncharacteristically destructive, largely due to climate change and more than a century of fire suppression. Mechanical thinning and prescribed fire are used to reduce wildfire size and severity, but compliance restrictions and logistical challenges, as well as agency staffing capacity and funding constraints, often limit the scale of their treatment.

The paper recommends that forest managers work in and adjacent to recent wildfire footprints to increase the pace and scale of fuel treatments, including low-to-moderate-severity wildfires (beneficial wildfire), and outlines three pathways for effectively leveraging these footprints:

• Create: To create the initial disturbance needed to build resistance to future high-severity wildfires, forest managers could strategically utilize burned edges (e.g. “the black”) as containment lines for prescribed fire in long-unburned forest.
• Enhance: Where low-to-moderately severe wildfires act as an initial treatment, it is rarely enough to achieve resilient conditions. This initial wildfire treatment could be enhanced with additional burns and thinning of dead trees, if needed. Where there are existing management treatments on the burned edges, managers could also leverage the black to implement burns.
• Maintain: In healthy forests that have experienced at least two beneficial disturbances – at least one of which was fire – forest managers could implement prescribed fire or managed wildfire for resource benefit to maintain those high-resistance conditions.

“We identified where forest management could build upon the fuel reduction work of both recent large wildfires and mechanical thinning/prescribed fire treatments to harden the forest against future high-severity wildfire,” said Kristen Wilson, lead forest scientist at The Nature Conservancy in California. “The largest opportunity, by far, is to enhance the resistance of the more than 740,000 forested acres that have experienced low-to-moderate-severity fire by implementing additional burns and thinning, where needed, to ensure these forests can withstand future wildfires.”

The paper also maps out extensive areas in the Sierra Nevada of California where forest managers could act in the next decade to build on the beneficial work of recent wildfires and forest fuel treatments.

“Historically, little attention has been given to wildfires as a major change agent, despite the fact that its ‘treatment’ acreage dwarfs mechanical thinning and prescribed fire,” said Malcolm North, research ecologist at the USFS Pacific Southwest Research Station. “By focusing management on beneficial fire treatment, we can reduce the cycle of high-severity fire impacts.”

This study builds on previous research from the three organizations, as well as the U.S. Geological Survey, and represents a shift in perspective on how wildfires are framed.

“Modern wildfires have many tragic effects—particularly the loss of lives, homes and large swaths of forest,” said Kristen Shive, fuels and forest specialist with the University of California Cooperative Extension Program at UC Berkeley. “However, we have a valuable opportunity to capitalize on some of the good work that wildfires do, but we must act fast. Critical policy changes that promote good fire would help to effectively leverage this work.”