Safely increasing prescribed fire with a simple & flexible tool
With partnerships, a model, and maps, fire managers on the Oconee National Forest in Georgia doubled the acres treated with prescribed fire.
The model is a flexible tool that can help people reach consensus on where to conduct prescribed fires. Numerous ecosystems across the South depend on fire.
In 2018, Tim Kolnik, the fire management officer on the Oconee Ranger District, and Joseph O’Brien, an SRS research ecologist, began prioritizing burn units with a modeling approach first developed in 2003.
“We’re now burning units we could never get to before,” says Kolnik.
In a webinar sponsored by the Southern Fire Exchange, O’Brien discussed the Burn Prioritization Model and fire.
“Fire is not an event, it’s a process,” says O’Brien. “Wildfires can be catastrophic, but fire is also a keystone biophysical process. Ecosystems that tolerate or depend on fire need it again and again, not only to achieve results but for maintenance.”
Thus, fire history is the most important variable in the model. “It has to be up at the top,” says O’Brien. “In the South, there’s a tipping point – if a stand goes beyond a certain point, it moves into an alternate stable state and prescribed fire is no longer as effective.”
On the Oconee NF, the target burn interval (the length of time between fires) is two to four years.
Before using the model, Kolnik and his team were burning about 15,000 acres a year. Since 2018, after they began using the model, they have been able to burn more than 30,000 acres each year. In fact, in fiscal years 2021 and 2022 combined, they burned a total of 64,000 acres. The Oconee NF spans about 116,000 acres.
Maps are the first step to using the model. With geospatial information systems, the team maps the land into burn units. Then, the attributes of each unit are identified. Attributes include fire history, the presence of threatened and endangered species, any planned timber harvests, cultural or archaeological values, or others. With the maps and the attributes, stakeholders work together to build a consensus on priorities.
On the Oconee NF, for example, stakeholders include silviculturists, biologists, ecologists, and others. One of the priorities they agreed on was red-cockaded woodpecker habitat. With this consensus in mind, the team ranked units with an active RCW nest as highest, those with an inactive nest in the middle, and those without a nest were not ranked on this factor. “The model concept is that you’re summing the rankings and the total allows you to rank the burn units and prioritize a burn schedule,” says O’Brien.
As the team has used the model, some principles have emerged. As O’Brien said:
- Compromise is essential. Priorities must be considered a zero-sum game both in informing the model and in executing the burns. If one objective gets 20 points, there are only 80 left to assign.
- Never trade a good acre for a bad acre. Always hit your easiest to burn units first. Get as many acres burned as quickly as possible. If you’re focusing on the hardest to burn areas and losing the areas that are in good condition, you’re losing ground.
- Think across space and time – past burns can help make future ones more efficient.
- This approach does not eliminate the need for burn boss expertise or reduce their decision space. What it does do is build efficiency and make the argument for prescribed fire operations much more compelling. The model can also be linked to a forest plan and is infinitely adaptable.
The model was originally developed in 2003, in a study led by Kevin Hiers, who is now at the Department of Defense Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program.
O’Brien streamlined the model and tailored it to the needs of the Oconee National Forest. O’Brien and colleagues at the University of Georgia in Athens have also developed a version for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.
The work is highly collaborative, and experts from Fire and Aviation Management in the Forest Service Southern Region have been key partners from the beginning.
Watch the webinar. Read the study. For more information, email Joseph O’Brien at joseph.j.obrien@usda.gov.