A Century of Wildland Fire Research Contributions to Long-term Approaches for Wildland Fire Management: Proceedings of a Workshop (2017) / Chapter Skim
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3 The Past and Future of Fire in the United States
3 The Past and Future of Fire in the United States
Pages 13-38
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From page 13... ...
Many fire problems are, in some ways, historically constructed, so understanding how that evolution has occurred is crucial to understanding how to respond to fire today. The history of wildland fire research is the story of ideas (many of them very old)
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From page 14... ...
William Greeley, who would succeed Graves as chief in 1920, said in 1911 that firefighting was a matter of scientific management, in principle no different than silviculture or other techniques. Two decades later, Earle Clapp, associate chief and acting chief in the late 1930s, agreed, arguing that forest fire research was the United States' responsibility because there was no precedent in Europe.
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THE PAST AND FUTURE OF FIRE IN THE UNITED STATES 15 FIGURE 3-1 Map of Utah territory representing the extent of the irrigable, timber, and pasture lands. NOTE: Tan area represents burned forest land.
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. BOX 3-1 The National Forest Commission In 1896, the Secretary of the Interior, Hoke Smith, asked the National Academy of Sciences to convene a group of forestry experts to answer the following questions: 1.
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The Forest Protection Board, established in 1928, made the Forest Service the lead federal agency for any public lands that had forests, and in the same year, the McSweeney-McNary Act established a comprehensive program of forest research in the agency, effectively making it the sole entity conducting fire research. A large amount of resources became available under the New Deal programs of the 1930s -- in particular through the Civilian Conservation Corps -- to mobilize men to fight
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Immediately following World War II, Arthur Brown -- who was the fire control chief for the Forest Service's Denver regional office and would become the agency's fire control chief in 1947 and fire research chief in 1950 -- rewrote Folweiler's text (Brown and Folweiler, 1946) , in which he reemphasized that the forest fire problem of the United States was unique and that European forestry had nothing to offer in terms of solutions.
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. There was also investment in several mass fire projects.4 The National Fire Coordination Study, which was the National Cohesive Strategy for Wildland Fire Management of its day, was initiated to determine what could be done to confine damage from nuclear fire.
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20 A CENTURY OF WILDLAND FIRE RESEARCH A B FIGURE 3-3 A, Richard Nixon on the roof of his house during the Bel Air–Brentwood Fire in 1961. B, Willard Libby in his Bel-Air bunker during the Bel Air–Brentwood Fire in 1961.
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From page 21... ...
of national forest land became part of the National Wilderness Preservation System. Other federal agencies, such as the National Park Service, wanted to break the hegemon the Forest Service held over fire science so they could implement their own policies, control their own programs, and have their own branches of research.
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In an effort to put the pieces together, the Forest Service, in cooperation with agencies from DOI, rolled out the National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy in 2014. Pyne found the strategy particularly interesting because the subtext that accompanies the 6 For more information about the Joint Fire Science Program, see 1998 Joint Fire Science Plan, available at https:// www.firescience.gov/JFSP_plan.cfm.
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Instead, fire science is funded because of the problems that fire seems to cause. The Forest Service is no longer a hegemon of fire research and fire control, and new institutions now contribute to what is known.
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Although the Forest Service is no longer an indispensable agency, a national system of fire management and fire research will not function without it. The agency is still a major player, catalyst, and supplier for achieving critical mass, and it is still a place where ideas will be tested in the field.
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From page 25... ...
Another participant asked Pyne to elaborate on his vision for a National Cohesive Strategy for Fire Science Research. Pyne said that, given the variety of people and disciplines i nvolved in fire, to avoid a continuation of the rising publication curve that does not translate into effects on the ground, a way needs to be found to bring the strengths of these various components together.
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They then linked the changes in fuel aridity to the amount of forest fire area that has burned, starting in 1984 and going through 2015. The data in Figure 3-6 show that there is a stark increase in burned areas related to specifically a nthropogenic climate change and drying of fuels.
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Balch and her colleagues recently looked at the human role of fire in the conterminous United States by using the U.S. Forest Service-sponsored Fire Program Analysis fire-occurrence database (FPA-FOD)
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In looking at the potential for people to change and shift fire regimes, it is necessary to understand the natural sources of ignitions. Balch and her colleagues looked at the density of dry lightning strikes (occurring with less than 2.5 mm of precipitation)
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Forest Service– sponsored Fire Program Analysis fire-occurrence database, 1992–2012. NOTE: Black boundaries delineated ecoregions.
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B, Percent of total lightning strikes occurring as dry lightning averaged over May to October, 1992–2013. SOURCE: Balch, side 16; Abatzoglou et al.
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Humanignited fires also overlap with where people live. However, ignition patterns differ by ecore FIGURE 3-12 Frequency distribution of fire ignitions in the conterminous United States by ecoregion, 1992–2012.
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. Questions that are important for the fire science community to answer are: Why are human-ignited fires increasing?
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From page 33... ...
Balch and colleagues have matched human-ignited fires and lightning-ignited fires with the current scientific under standing of how short-term fire danger is changing because of climate change, so they can look at the intersection of people and climate with regard to fire. Work by Moritz and colleagues has projected future climate scenarios and how future fire activity will change given those scenarios, going from 2010 to 2039 to 2099 (Moritz et al., 2012; Figure 3-15)
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From page 34... ...
Information contained in Cohesive Wildland Fire Management reports about the frequency and severity of fire in different fire regime groups provides justification for fire plain maps. In terms of how people use fire, Balch said fire science has enough data to support conducting more fires that have ecological benefits.
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From page 35... ...
landscape to a living palimpsest that has imprints and memories from past uses of the landscape, from human use of fire, and from fire being part of that landscape. Today's field of fire science is also a palimpsest because there is information and data from different sources that can help answer important questions about the future of fire.
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Forest Service Fire Modeling Institute. tists have at their fingertips information spanning from the map of forest fires that Charles Sargent gathered in the 1880 census (Figure 3-2)
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From page 37... ...
A participant asked if Balch had looked at the interior of Alaska and the change that is happening there. Balch replied that her 2017 study did not include Alaska because other good work that looks at the role of human- and lightning-ignited fires in Alaska has already been done.
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From page 38... ...
Balch replied that she did not know why fires decreased in Mediterranean California, and she hoped that the audience at the workshop could help answer that question because important lessons are likely to be learned.
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