We’re Not Doing Enough Prescribed Fire in the Western United States to Mitigate Wildfire Risk
Department of Forest, Rangeland, and Fire Sciences, University of Idaho, 875 Perimeter Dr. MS 1133, Moscow, ID 83844, USA
Fire 2019, 2(2), 30; https://doi.org/10.3390/fire2020030
Received: 28 April 2019
/
Revised: 17 May 2019
/
Accepted: 21 May 2019
/
Published: 29 May 2019
Prescribed fire is one of the most widely advocated management practices for reducing wildfire hazard and has a long and rich tradition rooted in indigenous and local ecological knowledge. The scientific literature has repeatedly reported that prescribed fire is often the most effective means of achieving such goals by reducing fuels and wildfire hazard and restoring ecological function to fire-adapted ecosystems in the United States (US) following a century of fire exclusion. This has translated into calls from scientists and policy experts for more prescribed fire, particularly in the Western US, where fire activity has escalated in recent decades. The annual extent of prescribed burning in the Western US remained stable or decreased from 1998 to 2018, while 70% of all prescribed fire was completed primarily by non-federal entities in the Southeastern US. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) was the only federal agency to substantially increase prescribed fire use, potentially associated with increased tribal self-governance. This suggests that the best available science is not being adopted into management practices, thereby further compounding the fire deficit in the Western US and the potential for more wildfire disasters.
View Full-Text
Keywords:
indigenous burning; traditional ecological knowledge; wildland fire; controlled burning; prescribed burning; Cerro Grande
▼
Show Figures
Figure 1
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
- Supplementary File 1:
PDF-Document (PDF, 396 KiB)
MDPI and ACS Style
Kolden, C.A. We’re Not Doing Enough Prescribed Fire in the Western United States to Mitigate Wildfire Risk. Fire 2019, 2, 30. https://doi.org/10.3390/fire2020030
AMA Style
Kolden CA. We’re Not Doing Enough Prescribed Fire in the Western United States to Mitigate Wildfire Risk. Fire. 2019; 2(2):30. https://doi.org/10.3390/fire2020030
Chicago/Turabian StyleKolden, Crystal A. 2019. "We’re Not Doing Enough Prescribed Fire in the Western United States to Mitigate Wildfire Risk" Fire 2, no. 2: 30. https://doi.org/10.3390/fire2020030
Find Other Styles
Note that from the first issue of 2016, MDPI journals use article numbers instead of page numbers. See further details here.
