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A CASE FOR RESTORING FIRE
 | Fire suppression over the last century has had profound effects on ecosystems where natural fire was a keystone ecological process. |
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| Prescribed burns are generally the most effective and cost efficient means of reducing future fire hazard. |
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| Stimulates seral herbaceous and shrubby vegetation, creating receptive seedbeds, and transforming nutrients into an available form. |
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| Prescribed Fire can create landscape diversity that would be impossible to replicate by mechanical means alone. |
The structural diversity created by fire is also the best way to integrate management for varied ecological communities.
Current forest condition, make it risky to the implementation of fire without mechanical treatments prior to prescribed burns. A management scheme that incorporates both mechanical thinning and prescribed fire is therefore most likely to succeed.
Figure 1: Click to Enlarge |
The effect of mechanical treatments used in conjunction with prescribed burns is illustrated by the Eldorado Fire in Boulder County (Figure 1). The background of this photo (green circle) received a thinning treatment and a prescribed fire in the fall of 1998 while the foreground (orange circle) received no treatment. A wildfire burned through both areas in September of 2000; a stand replacement crown fire occurred in the orange circle then transitioned to a low intensity surface fire with minimal tree mortality in the treatment area (green circle). |
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