Managing landscapes with fire in a safe, effective, and proactive way presents many social and ecological challenges. Some of these challenges include managing public perception of the benefits and risks of fire, overcoming policy barriers, finding resources for training and implementation, coordinating across jurisdictions, and bridging cultural differences.  

To help managers address these challenges, CASC-supported researchers have introduced an updated “decision space” meant to facilitate collaboration across multiple communities and intentional fire-use strategies (prescribed burns, wildfire management, and cultural burning by Indigenous communities). They explain this approach in a new publication in the journal Cell Reports Sustainability. This effort was led by fellows from the “Future of Fire” cohort of the Climate Adaptation Postdoctoral (CAP) Fellowship Program, put together by Madeleine Rubenstein, National Science Lead for the National CASC, and Shawn Carter, Senior Scientist for the National CASC. Each CAP fellow brought unique expertise to the project and collectively represented multiple CASC regions. 

The updated fire-use decision space incorporates socio-cultural factors alongside the biological and physical environmental factors that are normally considered. The decision space model has three aspects for decision-making in intentional fire use: 

1. Ecological Conditions: Includes bio-physical characteristics of the landscape, historical context, fuel, weather, and knowledge of how these factors vary across the landscape and seasons. 

2. Motivation for Use: Reasons for using intentional fire, such as restoring ecosystems or removing excess dry biomass (fuel) to lower the severity and risk of future fires.   

3. Capacity to Act: Societal factors like policy restrictions, legal issues, resource availability, constraints, and workforce characteristics that affect the ability to implement management practices. 

The framework’s major contribution is as a communication tool for fire managers to begin conversations and organize those conversations to better understand each other’s motivations, constraints, and resources for using fire intentionally. For example, using the framework can help identify when similar decision factors are called different names or exist within different policies across jurisdictions.  

By breaking down the decision-making process into parts (motivation for the burn, ecological conditions, and the capacity to act), the framework aims to align efforts across geographical regions and cultural contexts. Achieving this alignment is important for reaching fire management goals while avoiding conflict, misallocation of resources, and negative perceptions of using fire to manage landscapes.  

The authors demonstrate the interplay between these three aspects by providing three case studies that vary in their ecological conditions, motivations for use, and capacity to act: (1) the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex in Montana, (2) the Warren Grove Range in New Jersey, and (3) the Tribal EcoRestoration Alliance (TERA) in California. They also discuss challenges and gaps in fire management, such as instances when using fire intentionally to manage ecosystems works well in some areas but not in others. Islands like Hawaiʻi and Puerto Rico may not be well suited because they are not naturally fire adapted, while other areas, such as parts of Alaska, are geographically isolated and thus it is impractical to use intentional fire due to resource limitation. 

Overall, the new framework is intended to improve communication and collaboration among fire managers. Read more about the tool and these three case studies in the original publication, titled “A fire-use decision model to improve the United States’ wildfire management and support climate change adaptation.”  

This publication and the CAP Fellows Program were supported through the National CASC project “Future of Fire: Towards a National Synthesis of Wildland Fire Under a Changing Climate.”