This is the second installment of Mongabay’s coverage of active management tools for forest fires. Read Part 1. Photographs of forests in the western U.S. from the mid-1800s show a starkly different reality compared to what we see today, says Paul Hessburg, an ecologist and professor at the University of Washington. “It looks nothing like the current landscape,” he tells Mongabay. Today, many of these forests are overgrown and dominated by younger trees. Back then, they were typically more open — “park-like,” according to many scientists. They were part of a broader mosaic: conifer-dominated forests mixed with deciduous woodlands, open meadows and wetlands in a patchy broth of diverse habitats. Fire played an integral role — perhaps the integral role — in shaping these ecosystems. But soon, European-descended emigrants to the West shut it down in just about every way they could, with little understanding of the implications. Hessburg and other researchers spend their careers teasing apart these dynamics and looking for ways to replicate those effects through a set of “active management” tools, such as prescribed burning and thinning. Where possible, the goal is often to usher fire back into the landscape at lower intensities to promote regeneration and avoid the catastrophic megafires that have destroyed communities in recent years. In those cases, “The next fire often erases the opportunity for a future forest,” Hessburg says. “It’s so intense that it sterilizes soil [with] such burn severity, and it removes seed sources.” But this embrace of active management isn’t…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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