A firefighter stands near a low severity fire that is being managed for resource benefit.

Managed Wildfire: A Research Synthesis & Overview

All wildfires in the United States are managed, but the strategies used to manage them vary by region and season. “Managed wildfire” is a response strategy to naturally ignited wildfires; it does not prioritize full suppression and allows the fire to fulfill its natural role on the landscape, meeting objectives such as firefighter safety, resource …

Mitigating Postfire Runoff and Erosion

Wildfires in the southwestern US are getting larger, more frequent, and more severe due to changing climatic conditions like rising temperatures and prolonged drought (Singleton et al. 2018, Mueller et al. 2020). Catastrophic wildfire events directly impact communities, ecosystems, and cultural resources—and can pose continuing hazards long after the fire is extinguished. Flooding and erosion …

Fire and Soils in Frequent-Fire Landscapes of the Southwest

Working Paper 43 by Dan Binkley, Adjunct Faculty, School of Forestry, Northern Arizona University Forests and soils interact so strongly that any major change in one of them leads to a reshaping of the other. Fires consume fuels in a few hours that it took vegetation years or decades to produce. Forest soils are both …