UM center blazes trail with course about living with fire

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.

Prescribed burning is an emerging solution for government agencies to help mitigate wildfires. Although the methodology is relatively new for fire prevention in the West, prescribed fire has long been used for agricultural land management in the southeastern U.S. To help train the next generation of western fire scientists and fighters, the UM FireCenter provides an 11-day course in Georgia dedicated to learning about prescribed burning from those who who wrote the script on it.

Valentijn Hoff, the FireCenter’s prescribed fire program manager, said the opportunity for UM students to work with agency partners and researchers in fire science is an unbeatable educational experience.

“Our main goal is to get the students out there, get them involved and teach them about fire management in general,” Hoff said. “There’s a lot of overlap between prescribed fire and wildfire. It's not these two totally separate things.”

The trailblazing program has run for 17 years and is hosted by The Nature Conservancy, which uses several natural forest reserves. The agency is also a stalwart for researching prescribed fires – already establishing many field procedures as best practices for its deployment as a fire management tactic.

Hoff said burning in Georgia is advantageous in two principal ways.

The first is the ecosystem. The southeastern U.S. is one of the most biodiverse regions in terms of plants, with its large variety of grasses that have a positive relationship with fire. Second, the “burn windows” or timeframes in which it is safe to burn, are much larger in the temperate climate, making for a larger number of days that the team can be in the field. These conditions tend be more optimal for teaching prescribed fire, making Georgia one of the best places for the program.

“Besides the academic part where they learn about fire ecology among this ecosystem, it’s also just a really good opportunity for the students,” Hoff said. “They are on the ground, hands on, setting up a burn thinking about the real logistics. It’s all those little details that make you a good prescribed fire professional.”

Isaac Anderson, a UM undergraduate student in environmental science with a minor in fire science and management, said that the program was fundamental in helping him learn how to use fire as a tool.

“For anyone who's looking into a career in fire, I think it’s really important to have experience with prescribed fire,” he said. “You could go your whole career just doing suppression and you miss out on seeing how fire actually behaves and interacts.”

Each day out in the field, students run through the professional process that occurs prior to conducting a prescribed burn. This entails a briefing – which looks at weather, climate conditions and the moisture content of the ground fuel – all of which determine the logistics of the burn. Then, after walking through safety standards, they do a test burn to see how the fire interacts on the ground before proceeding to a larger area. Finally, they assign roles, giving each student a designated set of tasks to execute.

“One day, you could be a person with a drip torch putting fire on the ground and walking through the forest. The next day, you could be one of the squad leaders directing a small group of people,” Anderson said. “You really get a full range of experience.”

Anderson said the South is a national leader in progressing prescribed fire as a fire management method. Although the West has a way to go, he sees the spark of prescribed fire starting to spread. Agencies such as Montana’s Department of Natural Resources and Conservation started to test prescribed fire as a prevention tactic, and he believes this will be important for the future of fire management.

“For individuals who want to learn how fire affects its environment, prescribed fire is a great way to observe it in the world,” he said.

Back in Montana, the FireCenter continues its education at the 20,000-acre study site known as UM’s Lubrecht Experimental Forest. This stretch of protected land is owned and managed by the W.A. Franke College of Forestry & Conservation and is meant for conducting cutting-edge experiments that generate knowledge for the public and land managers. Prescribed burns typically happen in the late spring or early summer when conditions are safer.

The FireCenter and UM students who participate in its various programs and projects are central to a recent grant awarded to Montana universities from the National Science Foundation.

Known as the EPSCoR grant  (which stands for Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research), the FireCenter’s part of the award helps Montana universities, state agencies, private businesses and nonprofits work together to better understand prescribed burns and how they can prevent, contain and manage wildfires while considering the well-being of communities.

“Whether it’s workforce development or science – prescribed fire is a good way for us to start to understand wildfire,” Hoff said.