Integrating fire management into land management planning for west-side forests

Abstract

Fire management's integration into land management planning is critical to the successful management of nearly all wildland ecosystems, including westside forests, which lie west of the Cascade crest in Oregon and the northern coastal ranges in California. Restoration and maintenance of fire as an ecosystem process is critical to retention of biological diversity and ecosystem sustainability. Knowledge of the natural roles of fire across the landscape, the effects,of wildfire and prescribed fire, and the levels of risk of large-scale, high-severity fire, as well as the effects of fire exclusion must be incorporated into all scales of land management planning and assessment. Fire management planning must become an element of land management planning, rather than remain separate from (and typically undertaken subsequent to) land management planning. All aspects of fire management-fire suppression, prescribed fire, fuels management, smoke management, fire planning, modeling, risk and hazard analysis, fire history and fire ecology-will need to be considered by interdisciplinary teams during land management planning.

Parent Publication

• The use of fire in forest restoration

Citation

Teensma, Peter D. 1996. Integrating fire management into land management planning for west-side forests. In: Hardy, Colin C.; Arno, Stephen F., eds. The use of fire in forest restoration. Gen. Tech. Rep. INT-GTR-341. Ogden, UT: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Intermountain Research Station. p. 81-82.