This study investigates the key drivers influencing prescribed fire effects across 16 sites in northern and central California, with particular emphasis on how operational decisions by fire practitioners shape burn outcomes.
Restoring fire in fire-adapted ecosystems is necessary to curtail woody plant expansion, enhance biodiversity, and reduce wildfire risks, yet prescribed fire is promoted less by federal agencies than other grassland conservation practices. The U.S.
Elevated soil temperatures resulting from reintroduction of prescribed fire into long unburnt stands have been associated with unintended tree mortality. Several models exist to predict soil temperatures resulting from soil heating by fire; however, data to develop and validate these models are limited.
Wild and intentionally ignited fires are not new to North American landscapes or to the Indigenous cultures whose ancestral places encompass them. For millennia, Indigenous fire stewardship has been regionally and locally distributed across North American ecosystems.
Wildfires in the western US increasingly threaten infrastructure, air quality, and public health. Prescribed (“Rx”) fire is often proposed to mitigate future wildfires, but treatments remain limited, and few studies quantify their effectiveness on recent major wildfires.
Wildfire activity in the western United States has been on the rise since the mid-1980s, with longer, higher-risk fire seasons projected for the future. Prescribed burning mitigates the risk of extreme wildfire events, but such treatments are currently underutilized. Fire managers have cited lack of firefighter availability as a key barrier to prescribed burning.
Mechanical thinning is often prescribed in dry coniferous forests to reduce stand density, ladder fuels, and canopy fuels before using prescribed burning to manage surface fuels. Mechanical mastication is a tool for thinning forests where commercial thinning is not viable.
Fuel-reduction and restoration treatments (“treatments”) are conducted extensively in dry and historically frequent-fire forests of interior western North America (“dry forests”) to reduce potential for uncharacteristically severe wildfire.