UM center blazes trail with course about living with fire
A student works on a controlled burn at UM’s Lubrecht Experimental Forest. (UM photo by Tommy Martino)
MISSOULA – With extreme wildfires doubling in the past 20 years, many residents in the Western U.S. have smoldering concerns for their future safety and wellbeing. To help take wildfire management to the next level in the era of climate change, the FireCenter at the University of Montana has piloted a course to provide solutions for living alongside this growing threat.
To understand fire in the West, it is important to first understand the history of the region. To date, suppression has been the primary means of dealing with wildfire. This zero-tolerance policy slowly transformed the landscape and in some ways even fueled the fire. Without a consistent cadence of burns to clear ground fuels that accumulate during growing seasons, there are more small trees throughout regional forests.
These smaller trees serve as an intermediary step between the quick-burning material on the forest floor and the long-burning mature trees, which can cause wildfires to burn for extended periods of time. This is a similar concept to engineering a good campfire – the small trees are like the kindling that help carry a fire from the paper used to light it to the large logs that keep it burning into the night.
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