Forest Stewardship and Fires

[Gary_C]

I have been a avid, though intermittent reader of Jim Peterson's Evergreen Magazine and today I looked them up again. As usual he has some interesting editorials and stories to read and you can get to his website here: Evergreen Magazine

But one article caught my immediate interest with the fire season coming up. I am including a direct link to the authors article here if you care to take the time to read it: More Junk Forest Science from OSU

The tittle says it all and includes a bonus section called : Lying with photography

[timberfaller390]

I read through lie #7 and I must say that I partly agree with some of the things he suggests but I disagree with most of it. Large wildfires do destroy alot of timber but a well planned and exicuted prescribed burn does nothing but help. I never did understand if he thought prescribed fire was good or bad. I do not agree with him about big fires not being because of fuel model and minute changes in weather. Case in point: when I was still working with the Forestry Commission, we had certain "problem" areas that we would burn off every year at the start of fire season. No fuel, no fire, no problem. In areas that had never been burned off (at least not in the last 20 years) if a fire got started there, you had a big problem because you had fine fuels mixed with heavy fuels and was not an easy fire to get under control. A small change in weather on such fires could mean a quick easy mop-up or it could mean another day,week,month on the fireline.