The National Interagency Fire Center meteorologists are predicting a severe fire season from early June until at least September. As the western U.S. faces the 2025 wildfire season, learning how fires are managed on wildlands has never been more important.
Kendra Fallon, a geoscience doctoral candidate who has been in fire management positions for over 15 years starting as a primary firefighter, shares her insight. Her boots-on-the-ground experience fueled her decision to return to academia and help bridge the two worlds of professional fire management with science and higher education.
Fallon’s research interest is on applied fire and fuels management–how research tools like remote sensing and machine learning can be translated and leveraged to solve complex land management problems in an effort to move our landscapes towards a more resilient future.
1. Mini History lesson: The 1910 “Big Blowup”, the “10 a.m. Policy” and modern fire management
In 1910, a massive wildfire complex–started by excessive drought, lightning strikes and man-made ignition sources–burned 3 million acres across Idaho, Montana, Washington and British Columbia. The Great Fire of 1910, also known as “The Big Blowup” and the “Big Burn,” is possibly the largest wildfire in modern American history (the 1825 Miramichi Fire was also approximately 3 million acres, though mostly in Canada with a crossover into Maine).
Twenty-five years later, the Forest Service established the “10 a.m. policy.” This policy decreed that “every fire should be suppressed by 10 a.m. the day following its initial report,” according to the Forest History Society. This policy lasted until the early 1970s, until academic research and management outcomes by rebellious “light burners” (managers that continued to practice prescribed burning) demonstrated that this heavy-handed suppression was often ecologically mismatched.
Fire is an important natural process in almost all vegetated ecosystems, and modern fire managers continue to use the adaptive management process to navigate systems towards resilience. Fallon says navigating away from unsuccessful historic decisions and towards science-based adaptive management is critical to supporting a healthier, successful fire regime.
“It’s analogous to when you find yourself lost navigating a big city. It is not the time to take your hands off the steering wheel and just wander around hoping you’ll get back on your desired path. You have to put your hands back on the wheel and make decisions to get yourself to where you want to be. That’s how I feel about strategic fuels treatments and the increase of fire on the landscape. These are the ‘turns’ we need to make, and that overwhelming science supports,” Fallon said.
“These systems were designed to burn, and I always stress that fire is a ‘when’ not an ‘if.’ Our decision space is ‘chance’ or ‘choice,’ which is why I am such a proponent of prescribed burning. We opportunistically light fires under conditions that will result in desired fire effects, instead of leaving it up to chance.”
2. Fire can be a ‘spa day’ for well-managed ecosystems
For most readers, it’s difficult to look at something so ferocious and uncontrolled as a wildfire and remember that it has an important place in ecosystem management.
“We often have this conception that everything within the map of a burn perimeter is going to be a nuked moonscape, completely devoid of vegetation,” Fallon said.
But fire is essential to landscapes, and after spending 15 years in burned lands, Fallon says she is often impressed by the resiliency of the earth, and how fire rejuvenates the soil and plants that feed animal populations.
Fallon jokes that the treatments applied to help condition a landscape to receive fire appropriately is like going to a day spa. There are lots of different options to help produce a desired outcome. Often times, a severely ecologically degraded landscape needs multiple treatments to bring it back to a place where it can be maintained by wildland fire, or be in a state where risk to human safety and infrastructure is acceptably reduced. In timbered ecosystems, a combination of mechanical treatments (like thinning) with fire is the ultimate “spa package” that lands need in order to withstand future stressors.
“[This combination] gets the ecosystem back into a place where it can now take on more stressors, like ‘bugs and cruds’ (insects and diseases), and drought. Beyond being better positioned to absorb these external stressors, these treatments are critical to modifying future wildfire behavior. Research supports the fact that systems that do get these multiple treatments can withstand drought more because there’s less trees, there’s more resource availability to grow healthier ecosystems,” Fallon said.
3. Putting out wildfires is an ecological decision, not a guarantee
Putting out wildfires immediately might feel intuitive, and, when there are immediate threats to high value infrastructure, communities and human safety, is wholly appropriate. However, a majority of landscapes actually need fire’s renewal effect and land managers have to make the decision of how best to let the fire do its work for the landscape while also taking into risks.
“In most cases, by putting a fire out, what we’re doing is basically not paying the bill as far as the fuel accumulation,” Fallon said. “For every fire that we put out, that fuel is going to continue to grow. Think of it like not paying your credit card; it’s going to accrue interest and becomes even harder to pay off. It’s something that people don’t often think about when it comes to forest management.”
4. There’s more to fuel management than meets the eye
A fire’s path depends on the fuels available to consume, and depending on factors such as the landscape, season, how the land is used and more, land managers have to think and act critically to decide what fuels are available to burn along with the socio-economic and ecological effects. This also requires preplanning how the managed fuels will burn, where they will produce smoke, and how that may impact communities.
For example, Fallon shared that different landscapes, say timbered versus sagebrush, would have very different fuel management approaches. Timbered land may require logging, chipping brush, or ‘lop and scatter’ which involves cutting and spreading underbrush to potentially burn in a future prescribed fire or to leave for decomposition. Sagebrush on the other hand often requires methods like cutting fuel breaks throughout a sagebrush system so that the fire can’t leap from bush to bush.
In some cases, like the chaparral landscapes of southern California and the sagebrush systems in the Great Basin, ecosystems are burning too often, and the prescription of adding fire is not appropriate. Intimate ecological knowledge of the appropriate burn rotations, or “fire return intervals” for ecosystems is a critical component in the decision making process of managing fire on the landscape.
Fallon stressed that “fire management is not just ‘fire fighting’. It takes multiple disciplines– wildlife specialists, hydrologists, aquatic biologists– to develop the management plans to evaluate how to employ fire on the landscape. Working across disciplines is why I love being in fire management, you’re constantly learning.”
5. Fire managers have to manage their own potential as spreaders of invasive or ecologically distinct species
In Idaho, the threat of invasive cheatgrass seeding itself on a fire-stricken landscape is a big threat. It dramatically increases the fire return interval in the sagebrush system to levels that can greatly degrade habitat. In more timbered settings where cheatgrass is less of a concern, Fallon says that fire management professionals and their equipment can also be vectors for spreading invasive species. This potential requires serious planning, cleansing and mitigation processes.
Weed washing stations are used to keep weed seeds from transferring to different ecosystems, and fire managers will often use pre-existing camp sites where weed suppression is already happening. Boots, fire engines, clothing, hoses and more could all be vectors for invasive weed spread. Fortunately, Fallon says fire suppression resources have a significant amount of invasive weed management response.
However weeds aren’t the only things that can be spread. Hoses and water buckets used for aerial support can potentially pick up mussels and water wildlife from one lake and transfer it to new ecosystems, causing ecological damage.
“I actually get more concerned about water than I do plants,” Fallon said. “Those draft hoses are washed and cleaned and dried before they’re deployed. Additionally, the buckets that are underneath helicopters dipping in one area that maybe has Quagga Mussels or Zebra Mussels, and then that aircraft has to be reassigned to a new area–there is a significant amount of attention and research that is being paid to appropriately mitigate that.”
She concluded, “The impact of fire doesn’t stop when the fire is ‘out.’ The monitoring and rehabilitation of those burned landscapes is also part of the response. It takes a considerable and diverse workforce, and multiple years to see these landscapes through the impact of the fire to make sure that we’ve steered them into a resilient direction for the next fire.”
For more information, Fallon recommends reading: