Q&A: Learning from the Past to Chart the Future of Fire in Western Forests | Article

The severity of some wildfires ravages the ecosystems and communities in their path. But fire is not exclusively a destructive force in the forest. EESI sat down with Dr. Ryan Haugo, director of conservation science for The Nature Conservancy in Oregon, to discuss ecologically-focused forest management practices whereby fire restores the landscape rather than destroying it. Haugo also shared the latest scientific research that underpins this on-the-ground work.

EESI: What is fire’s role in the Pacific Northwest?

Haugo: There is no one right answer for what fire should look like. Much of the research that I have been involved with compares western landscapes today to our best understanding of what they looked like prior to 20th century management and prior to Euro-American settlement. In 2019, I published a study with a number of colleagues in Washington and Oregon, the U.S. Forest Service, and academic institutions, in which we compared contemporary fires in Pacific Northwest forests to modeled estimates of how much, how extensive, and how severe fires might have burned naturally.

When I say there is no one right answer for what fire should look like, it recognizes that even historically, there were fires that were severe—there would be patches where all of the trees would be killed in a fire. Also, fires in a dry ponderosa pine forest in eastern Oregon would burn differently than fires in the North Cascades in Washington State. But, when we look at the whole region, what we see is that we have had much less fire over the last 30 years than naturally would have burned, especially within dry forests that were historically maintained by frequent, low- or moderate-severity fires. Fires burning today are different—they are less frequent but more severe.

We know we cannot go back in time, and we know that our climate is changing. Still, these historical reference conditions, from a time when these forests were experiencing frequent fire, help provide a guide for what increased health and resilience might look like today. What we are trying to do now with ecological restoration-focused management in the dry forest is to set up the conditions for more frequent but less severe fires.

EESI: How have forests been managed over the last century and how does this context inform current forest health management work?

Haugo: The dry forest landscapes that we find across the West were historically maintained by frequent fire—fires that were started by lightning as well as widespread Indigenous cultural burning. This frequent fire that typically would have burned every five to 30 years was a big part of what kept those forests healthy and resilient.

Over the last century plus, we have intentionally suppressed wildfire and curtailed cultural burning in our forests. Many of these forests have also been intensively managed, including through the extensive removal of the big, old trees that were drought and fire resistant and through intensive grazing during the early part of the 20th century. As a result, these forests are in a very different condition today.

Many of these forests are no longer filled with large, old trees that are able to easily withstand frequent, low-intensity fire. Today, forests are much denser with small trees and often full of tree species that are not as drought or fire resistant. This buildup of fuel has left many of our forests much more susceptible to uncharacteristically severe and large wildfires.

When we talk about forest health and resilience, we are talking about how we can help promote a condition in our forests where the important natural and cultural role of fire can be restored, and where forests are able to continue providing all of the benefits that we depend upon, from habitat and water, to recreational opportunities and clean air. Forest health and resilience also means we can count on our forests to provide all of these benefits into the future even in the face of a warming and drying climate.

EESI: What does promoting forest health look like in practice?

Haugo: If we think about an individual forest stand that you could walk into and look at the individual trees, what we first look at is: What are the conditions today? Is this a forest in which the oldest, largest, most fire-resistant trees were logged in the last century or is this an area that still has its old trees but, because of fire exclusion, has been densely filled in with young trees?

Then, foresters and ecologists would write a restoration prescription. This will include keeping the large, old fire-resistant trees in place. The treatment prescription often starts with ecological thinning, using chainsaws and other mechanical tools to remove the small and medium trees that have grown in the absence of frequent fire, in order to bring down the amount of fuel in that forest. When conducting ecological thinning, we do not want the forest to look like a plantation. Ecology is messy, and so we want clumps of trees, and we want gaps and openings. We want variability.

After careful ecological thinning, it is crucial that we put fire back into that forest. Oftentimes, we have a controlled burn. This means there is a specific prescription written by fire professionals, specifying the amount of fuel and the specific weather conditions under which the forest could be burned. When it is burned, there are fire practitioners carefully making sure that all of the conditions are right. It is the combination of ecological thinning followed by a controlled fire that makes up the full restoration package. But our work is not done, we then want to think forward into the future about how we will maintain that forest going forward. Fire is an important tool in that regard, so we often think about how to continue using fire on whatever the interval would be that would be natural for that particular forest.

EESI: How are you seeing ecologically-managed forest areas respond when impacted by a wildfire?

Haugo: There is a strong body of scientific evidence demonstrating that resilience treatments can be effective. It shows that where we have been able to restore the structure, composition, and ecological processes of our dry forests, it can change the outcome of the wildfires that we are experiencing today.

The Bootleg Fire that burned in Southcentral Oregon last summer was an over 400,000-acre megafire that started burning in July. It burned across portions of The Nature Conservancy’s Sycan Marsh Preserve, an area where we have several thousand acres of dry forest that we have been working to restore over the last decade plus. While we are still evaluating how effective our treatments were, our initial observations on the ground show that the areas that had undergone a full range of ecological restoration treatments reduced the severity and the intensity with which the Bootleg wildfire burned.

It is critical to remember that fire in our dry western forests is both inevitable and essential. We are not going to stop having wildfires. Our goals for restoration and resilience treatments are to change how the wildfires are burning, and to improve the outcomes from future fires.

EESI: What is the appropriate scale to be thinking about forest management?

Haugo: All scales are important. An individual forest stand is the scale at which people connect with our forests. That is also often the scale at which individual management or restoration projects happen. And that is the scale at which we have done a lot of our research within dry western forests.

Going up a level, we can think about watersheds. Watersheds are important to understanding how forests and water interact, and they are often a scale that we use in doing conservation or land management planning.

Much of the research that I have conducted has been looking at landscape scales, thinking about how we can build tools and data to look at entire ecoregions. How can we look at all of the Pacific Northwest at once? At this large landscape scale, we work to understand what condition our forests are in, the level of need for ecological restoration, and wildfire trends. Exploring these landscape-scale issues can help inform policy direction at the state or federal level.

We need to piece together all the lessons that we learn at the different levels and summarize them together at a level that can inform how society makes investments and decisions.

EESI: How does funding play into the ability to manage forests in the way research shows will make forests more resilient?

Haugo: Funding, including the investments needed to build an adequate workforce, has not been sufficient to address this challenge at the scale needed. One way we know this is by looking at the level of proactive restoration in our forests compared to the amount that is burning in wildfires each year. Right now, the area that burns in wildfire each year is dwarfing the proactive treatments happening. So we are behind the curve, and we are getting further behind.

At the same time, we are in a pretty unique moment with the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (P.L. 117-58) and the new U.S. Forest Service Confronting the Wildfire Crisis Strategy. This is a massive influx of funding and a new focus of our public agencies on ecologically-focused resilience management in dry forests. I am heartened to see these very large, new investments, and I hope that these down payments can begin to bring our funding and workforce up to the necessary levels.

Addressing wildfire is an all-of-society challenge that needs an all-hands-on-deck approach. This must be an approach that emphasizes the critical role of collaborating and coordinating with partners at all levels, state, tribes, counties, and community and non-governmental organizations.

EESI: What resources do you recommend for Congressional staff who want to learn more about forest management and wildfires?

Haugo: There is a great series of synthesis papers, Climate Change and Western Wildfires, that came out in the journal Ecological Applications in July 2021. These papers have more than 40 co-authors from 20 research organizations, and they synthesized hundreds of individual studies capturing the current state of science.

The Nature Conservancy has also published policy recommendations for national forest policy.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Author: Anna McGinn