National Park Service fire restoration, policies versus results: What went wrong

Abstract

In the 1960s the US National Park Service developed a policy designed to restore the natural ecological role of wildland fire. The policy was driven by growing understanding of ecosystem management benefits, as reflected in the 1963 Leopold Report on wildlife management in national parks. The new policy was designed to reverse decades of aggressive wildfire suppression that had caused disruptions in habitats and vegetative communities, and unnaturally high wildland fuel accumulation. More than 50 years later, the policy has largely failed to achieve its goals. This failure is due not just to climate change and the rise of new fire regimes dominated by mega-fires. It also was due to a lack of clear and unified organizational commitment by many parks, along with continued administrative comfort with fire suppression-oriented thinking, particularly during the window of opportunity between 1970 and 2000. During this time program emphasis shifted from ecosystem restoration to hazard fuels reduction, and program direction from Natural Resources staff to Emergency Services personnel. Efforts to establish a balance between emergency response thinking and resource management thinking largely failed due to institutional barriers and funding/staffing decisions driven by the threat of large wildfires. Park managers became wary of natural fire regime restoration efforts after the 1988 Yellowstone fires and the 2000 Cerro Grande Fire. This accelerated the demise of the Leopold Report vision of restoring and maintaining the ecological role of natural fire. In its place, wildfire suppression philosophy again became predominant, as reflected in the National Fire Plan with its focus away from ecological fire use and toward hazard fuel reduction in support of protecting the wildland urban interface. Restoring the Leopold Report vision requires an interdivisional commitment by Park emergency response and resources management organizations, guided by leadership at all organizational levels. It now may be timely to establish an NPS advisory board on wildland fire management similar to the one that produced the Leopold Report. This Board should review wildland fire policy implementation over the past 58 years, determine whether the ecosystem restoration paradigm is still valid, and if so, then the types of leadership and organizational changes required to achieve it.

The 2020 California fire season: A year like no other, a return to the past or a harbinger of the future?

“…Agency success in managing fire is still gauged as a function of reducing the area burned, although we have known for half a century or more that the artificial reduction of burned area in frequent‐fire forests leads inexorably to stand densification and fuel accumulation (Safford et al., 2021; Steel et al., 2015). Thirty years after the move to ecological fire management, the 2000 National Fire Plan redirected federal agencies to emphasize human asset protection (Botti & Nichols, 2021). In the years since, steady erosion has occurred in the resource management capacities of federal and many state agencies, such that fire operations budgets have ballooned (with little apparent effect on national wildfire trends), but fuel reduction, fire prevention and reforestation/restoration budgets have dwindled.…”

Drivers of California’s changing wildfires: a state-of-the-knowledge synthesis

“…This practice, commonly referred to as 'managed fire for resource benefit' (alternative names include 'prescribed natural fire' or 'wildland fire use'), has proven effective in reducing fuels, increasing forest resilience, and minimising the severity of subsequent wildfires (Meyer 2015;Stephens et al 2021). Yet, five decades after federal agencies formally recognised the importance of fire as an ecological process, both managed wildfire and prescribed fire remain underutilised as management tools in western USA (Kolden 2019;Botti and Nichols 2021;Safford et al 2022). Revised federal policy guidance enacted in 2009 has expanded opportunities to use wildfire for ecological benefit, allowing for wildfires to be managed for multiple objectives (e.g.…”

Remotely sensing the effects of managed wildfire programs on Sierra Nevada meadows

“…It is worth noting that the follow-through on managed wildfire for ecological benefit in SEKI has not been consistent. Political and regulatory pressure due to megafires has led to suppression efforts becoming recentered in the park's management for periods of the managed wildfire program's history (Botti andNichols 1983, Botti andNichols 2021). The legacy effects of managed wildfire in SEKI appear to vary greatly across the landscape and across vegetation types.…”