A review of the scientific contributions enabled by wilderness fire management

Abstract

Background Wilderness areas are important natural laboratories for scientists and managers working to understand fire ecology. In the last half-century, shifts in agency culture and policy have encouraged the management practice of letting some naturally ignited fires burn, allowing fire to fulfill its ecological role and increasing the extent of fire-related research opportunities. With the goal to identify the global scientific advances enabled by this paradigm shift in wilderness fire management, we conducted a systematic review of studies in which 1) protected areas were selected for investigation because of an active fire regime enabled by wilderness fire management, or 2) applied research was conducted to support wilderness fire management. Results Our systematic review returned a sample of 222 papers that met these criteria, with an increase in wilderness fire science over time. Studies largely occurred in the United States of America and were concentrated in a relatively small number of protected areas, particularly in the Northern Rocky Mountains. As a result, this sample of wilderness fire science is highly skewed toward areas of temperate mixed conifer forests and historical mixed severity fire regimes. Common principal subjects of papers included fire effects (44%), wilderness fire management (18%), or fire regimes (17%), and studies tended to focus on vegetation, disturbance, or wilderness management as response variables. Conclusions This work identifies major scientific contributions facilitated by active fire management, including concepts such as self-limitation of fire, forest dynamics in active fire regimes, and the effect of fire on wilderness recreation. Our work also identifies areas—both geographic and conceptual—where more research attention is needed and highlights under-represented wilderness areas that could serve to fill these knowledge gaps.

Event-scale impact and recovery of forest cover following wildfire in the Northern Rocky Mountains

“…Throughout the 1970s, the Selway area hosted a series of experiments that laid the foundation for transitioning away from re suppression, ultimately paving the way for policy shifts towards non-intervention for most wilderness res (Berkey 2020). Since this transition, the re history in the SB has been extensively studied because of its legacy as a natural laboratory (Kreider et al 2022).…”

“…It harnesses a training set of four million pixels to produce consistent cover estimates with known accuracy, and it can be updated easily to monitor into the future. Designated wilderness is well-suited for this investigation because its unique management context provides a natural laboratory for observing re and vegetation dynamics relatively unfettered by human in uences such as harvesting, planting, and reseeding (Kreider et al 2022).…”