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Theory suggests that natural fire regimes can result in landscapes that are both self-regulating and resilient to fire. For example, because fires consume fuel, they may create barriers to the spread of future fires, thereby regulating fire size.…
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When the federal agencies established policies in the late 1960s and early 1970s to allow the use of natural fires in wilderness, they launched a natural fire management experiment in a handful of wilderness areas. As a result, wildland fire has…
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We demonstrated the utility of digital fire atlases by analyzing forest fire extent across cold, dry, and mesic forests, within and outside federally designated wilderness areas during three different fire management periods: 1900 to 1934, 1935 to…
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Distinguishing favorable versus undesirable outcomes of wildland fires in coniferous forest ecosystems is challenging and requires a clear and objective approach. I applied the natural range of variation (NRV) concept and used fire severity…
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Wilderness fire, its history, challenges, teachings, and future management were the focus of discussions and presentations during the 40 Years of Wilderness Fire in the Selway-Bitterroot field trip at the May 2014 Large Wildland Fires Conference.…
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On August 18, 1972, an aerial patrol reported a snag burning deep in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness in Idaho. Bob Mutch, then a young research forester, traveled to the site the following day for an on-the-ground assessment. It was, Mutch later…
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In many U.S. federally designated wilderness areas, wildfires are likely to burn of their own accord due to favorable management policies and remote location. Previous research suggested that limitations on fire size can result from the evolution of…
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A goal of fire management in wilderness is to allow fire to play its natural ecological role without intervention. Unfortunately, most unplanned ignitions in wilderness are suppressed, in part because of the risk they might pose to values outside of…
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Ecological systems often exhibit resilient states that are maintained through negative feedbacks. In ponderosa pine forests, fire historically represented the negative feedback mechanism that maintained ecosystem resilience; fire exclusion reduced…
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Grand Teton National Park (GTNP) and the Bridger-Teton National Forest (BTNF) cover approximately 3.7 million acres within the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. The majority of this land base is fairly remote, much of it either designated Wilderness or…
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An important objective for many federal land management agencies is to restore fire to ecosystems that have experienced fire suppression or exclusion over the last century. Managing wildfires for resource objectives (i.e., allowing wildfires to burn…
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Two major factors affecting wilderness fire regimes and their management are climate variability and surrounding land use. Patterns in climate and housing densities are expected to change dramatically in the next several decades (IPCC 2007; Theobald…
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The promise of wildland fire use (WFU) is that, over time, the fires will play a more natural role, creating a jigsaw-puzzle pattern of burned and regrowing patches over a landscape and gradually moving it closer to the stand structure and species…
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On the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana, U.S., the Mission Mountains Tribal Wilderness is bordered by a buffer zone. To successfully improve forest health within that buffer zone and restore fire in the wilderness, the managing agency and the…
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The Forest Service authorizes broad scale wildland fire use (WFU) both inside and outside wilderness areas in many western forests; but, will agency authorization alone lead to implementation? Understanding barriers and facilitators to WFU…
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The 2003 Bear Butte and Booth (B&B) Fires burned much of the Mount Jefferson Wilderness in the Deschutes and Willamette National Forests, Oregon. A question for managers is how best to manage recreation in fire-affected areas in ways that…
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Research at the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex in Montana explored differences in recreation visitors’ attitudes towards the use of management-ignited prescribed fires in the wilderness. A mail-back survey of visitors (n = 291) during the 2004…
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A spectacular forest in the center of the Crown of the Continent Ecosystem (CCE) cuts a 15- by 5-km swath along the Flathead River's South Fork around Big Prairie in the middle of the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area in Montana (Figure 13- 1). This…
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United States wildland fire policy and program reviews in 1995 and 2000 required both the reduction of hazardous fuel and recognition of fire as a natural process. Despite the fact that existing policy permits managing natural ignitions to meet…
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American society has a general cultural bias toward controlling nature (Glover 2000) and, in particular, a strong bias for suppressing wildfire, even in wilderness (Saveland et al. 1988). Nevertheless, the Federal Wildland Fire Management Policy…
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