Fighting Fire with Restoration
Pictures from 2021’s Bootleg Fire in Southern Oregon. “Fire burned more intensely in areas that did not receive fuels treatments” - USFS news release, July 21, 2021.
“The goal is not to reduce the amount of fire on the landscape. The goal is to reduce the amount of high severity fire on the landscape.” - Josh White, US Forest Service, Colville National Forest.
In the West, massive wildfires are now routine. Every summer we can expect to see and breathe the smoke, hear of homes and communities that are lost, and watch our forests burn.
But there is active management - on public, private, and Tribal lands - that works to downgrade the severity of some wildfires and to prevent them becoming a megafire. Below, we’ll cover some of the active management treatment types, what they look like, and the value they create on the landscape.
This article is based on a conversation with Josh White, a Forest Service employee from the Three Rivers Ranger District in Northeast Washington, discussing their strategies and ideas behind management on eastside dry forests in the West. These strategies don’t focus on preventing fire, but preventing megafire. The goal is to not get rid of fire, it is to prevent the majority of a fire from being a high severity fire. Traditional fires, on average, would have been about 10-20% high severity. Today’s fires, on average, are 75-90% high severity. These high-severity fires occur when the whole tree burns all the way into the top-most canopy; most/all vegetation and smaller trees burn; and the soil gets so scalded it often takes longer for area to recover..
The facts are this: fire is a natural, unpreventable part of the Western landscape that will continue to happen, one way or another; and because we have suppressed and fought fire for the last century, many landscapes simply look different than they did when fire was regularly occurring on the landscape.
The goal then becomes to mimic what fire used to do on these landscapes. There are lots of goals with forest management, but two main focal points are tree density and species management. Before European colonization, and often with the influence of Indigenous burning, forests had a mixed composition of species, such as doug-fir, pine, and aspen in a forest like the Colville National Forest, and a wide variance of density and structure. Parts of the forest would have had old growth, with few or no smaller trees and underbrush. Others would have been burned recently, resulting in significant new tree growth. There would be meadows and deadfall - a mosaic of variance. When a fire strikes in these highly variable forests, it burns hot and fast in some areas and slows down in others. Traditionally, and generally speaking for eastside forests, fire would have burned as about 80% low severity and 20% high severity. Low severity would burn the underbrush, some smaller trees, but the older and more resilient trees would simply have some scorch on their bark. High severity means the fire gets into the canopy, burning trees from top to bottom and jumping from tree to tree. Today, that severity ratio is flipped, with many fires burning up to 90% or more as high severity.
Restored (right) versus overgrown (left) on the Colville National Forest
The goal then is to mimic what we know about old forests through forms of active management such as thinning and prescribed fire. This means protecting older trees, which have thicker bark and can withstand lower severity fire. We want to remove some of the smaller trees, and thin some parcels out, and we also want to keep some areas thicker for habitat. Most importantly our goal is to thin out certain species – grand-fir, spruce, and doug-fir being good examples. These trees tend to be more shade-tolerant and less fire tolerant, so when they grow as a densely packed patch, they burn hot and fast, and they allow fire to work itself into the canopy. Thinning of these species allows fire to slow and hopefully prevents high canopy fires, where fires can quickly get out of control. Fortunately, these species of trees are desirable for commodity lumber.
This is why milling infrastructure is a considerable advantage when it comes to restoration and prevention of megafire. When mills purchase logs, the Forest Service can recoup some of the cost of their management, and they can use that money to further propel other forms of management through stewardship contracts – road and trail maintenance, installation of aquatic fish passages like culverts and bridges, and perform in-stream restoration by inserting large and wood debris into streams. These forms of management protect species, build habitat, and make recreation more accessible.
Active management also makes it easier for fire teams to fight the fire. When an area has already been thinned, it creates fuel breaks that can slow down, misdirect, or stop a fire. In areas that haven’t been managed, fire crews often have to log trees, move material around, and manually create fuel breaks - all while a fire could be quickly moving their way.
At the end of the day, some megafires are just that - mega. Hot weather, powerful winds and drought all make for fire conditions that create megafires. We have to recognize the impacts of climate change on our forests, and the role that hotter summers and drier conditions will have on our future. But where moderate conditions exist, fires can be slowed and less severe, especially in areas that have been treated with thinning or prescribed fire. At the end of the day, the forest was meant to burn. For some eastside dry forests, that was historically as often as every 7-15 years.
We have the tools to actively manage and restore our forests - this work creates jobs, timber, healthier forests, and it can prevent megafires. As Josh White puts it, “it’s all in the long game, it may take a long time, but we are on the right path to prepare the forest to burn naturally.”
“Mechanical and fire-treated area reveals low-intensity fire has burned stumps and left ash, but many large trees remain.” USFS picture from Bootleg Fire in Southern Oregon, summer 2021.
