As wildfires get more intense, there are questions about how effective prescribed fire and other fuel treatments can still be. New research suggests that they can still have real impacts.
The 2020 season brought large, severe wildfires to Colorado: together, the Cameron Peak, East Troublesome, Mullen and Calwood fires burned nearly 600,000 acres and destroyed more than 1,000 homes. But within their perimeters, some 25,000 acres had received fuel treatments like thinning or prescribed fire, or had already burned in recent wildfires.
“There was just a lot of questions that we were getting: Did they work? What could we have done better? What was the most effective?” said Camille Stevens-Rumann, a Colorado State University fire ecologist and lead author of a recent study of those burns.
“Those treatments still did something, even when we had those really extreme days,” she added. “We're talking about 50 to 100,000 acres burning in a single day.”
“Areas treated with fire, both prescribed fire and previous wildfire, consistently showed the lowest burn severity among treatment types,” the paper reads. “In addition, forest types with historically frequent low-severity fire regimes, such as ponderosa pine, were associated with the greatest reductions in burn severity between treated and untreated areas.”
Increasing the strategic use of wildfires – allowing them to burn when it can be done safely – is a particularly promising tactic, according to Stevens-Rumann.
“[Wildfire] has the biggest potential because it is already treating more of our landscape than anything else,” she said. “And if we utilized it to our benefit at greater frequency, we would be moving that needle of the amount of acres we need to treat to change our wildfire problem.”
“Dramatically increasing the amount of beneficial fire on our landscapes is essential,” a major 2023 federal wildfire commission report found. “Fires serve to reduce flammable materials that fuel undesirable high-severity wildfires, thus mitigating risk to communities and fire-adapted landscapes.”
“In most fire-adapted ecosystems, we need significantly more fire on the land and around our communities, not less, which will require adaptation, mitigation, and policy change,” it continued.
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Boise State Public Radio, Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Northern Colorado, KANW in New Mexico, Colorado Public Radio and KJZZ in Arizona as well as NPR, with support from affiliate newsrooms across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Eric and Wendy Schmidt.
