For our fifth episode of the the Fire in the Southwest Series, we’re talking managed wildfires, which has a number of alter egos depending on who you talk to in the wildfire world, some of which include “wildland fire use” or “managing wildfires for resource benefit”.

Dr. Jose “Pepe” Iniguez, a research ecologist at the Rocky Mountain Research Station, is our fearless leader on this journey through the fraught, occasionally contentious world of managed fire. Pepe has had a long career studying wildfire impacts in forested landscapes while building a better understanding of how our public lands have been shaped by disturbances like wildfire. His takeaway? We can’t effectively manage forests at the landscape scale without the help of wildfires, and managed fire is the most feasible answer to the question of how we reach “scale” in our ability to build landscape resilience.

In short, managed fires are often lightning-caused wildfires that are determined to be burning in an area that is not likely to impact nearby communities, infrastructure, watersheds etc. As such, they are not managed with “full suppression” as the main priority. They are heavily monitored by ground resources (if the fire is accessible) and aircraft, though on occasion these fires become “wildfires for resource benefit” merely because there aren’t enough resources to attend to them. See: the 2021 fire season in California. In many cases, these types of fires burn in wilderness areas where fire suppression can be extremely difficult because of a lack of access, and which is made all the more difficult by designations that disallow the use of things like chainsaws and helicopters. 

Want more information about managed fire? Check out this fact sheet from our sponsor for this episode, the Southwest Fire Science Consortium. 

This recent blog post from the Fire Adapted Communities Learning Network is also very much worth the read if you’re hungry for more context around managed fire. This blog was  written by a recent guest of the podcast, Zander Evans from the Forest Stewards Guild. 

A huge thank you to both the Southwest Fire Science Consortium and the Arizona Wildfire Initiative for supporting this episode and all of the other episodes from our Fire in the Southwest Series. 

Timestamps: 

00:00 – Episode Start 

01:31 – Pepe’s Background 

07:56 – 1996 Fires

11:04 – The Early Days Of Managed Fire 

14:01 – Thinning Versus Fire, Thinning PLUS Fire

16:00 – Prescribed Fire Scales As A Tool 

17:40 – Pepe’s View On Managed Fire 

19:48 – Lessons Learned with Managed Fire

22:24 – The Benefit of Starting Small in Building A Managed Fire Program 

25:24 – Experimental Forests 

28:27 – Hotshot Crews Work On the Long Valley Experimental Forest 

30:47 – Smaller, More Local Incident Management Teams Often Work Better 

32:56 – Social Implications Of Managed Fires 

35:29 – Thoughts on Improving Public Perception of Managed Fires  

38:30 – Prescribed Fire and Managed Fire Have Different Liabilities

40:06 – Do We Need A Fire Influencer? Pepe suggests Britney Spears. 

41:37 – The Work of the Southwest Fire Consortium 

49:50 – Episode End