Resources
Wildland fire resources are critical to understanding the complexities of how to best manage the natural and human elements of wildland fire. This space contains information to increase information sharing within the community of practice working on Wildland Fire and Prescribed Burning.
Scientists participate in a Prescribed Fire Science Consortium collaborative fire research event at Tall Timbers Research Station. Photo: David Godwin, Southern Fire Exchange / University of Florida.
Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center
Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center provides community discussion boards, podcast episodes, videos, and other resources aimed at making wildland fire performance and organizations safer.
National Interagency Prescribed Fire Training Center
National Interagency Prescribed Fire Training Center provides opportunities for federal, state, local, and tribal government agencies and other organizations to build skills and knowledge of prescribed fire, with an emphasis on field experience.
Wildland Fire Safety Training Annual Refresher Catalog
The National Wildfire Coordinating Group's Wildland Fire Safety Training Annual Refresher (WFSTAR) catalog includes a variety of modules helpful to wildland fire practitioners.
World of Wildland Fire
World of Wildland Fire includes a variety of online courses for fire science educators, trainers, and the public on topics including fire behavior, fuels, and fire ecology.
National Fire Academy online courses
Online learning is a terrific option if you want to take National Fire Academy (NFA) classes. Our online self-study and mediated courses are free to fire and emergency services personnel, and international students are welcome. Continuing Education Units (CEUs) are available for most courses. Successful completion is added to your NFA transcript, and you earn an NFA certificate.
Wildland Fire Learning Portal
Wildland Fire Learning Portal is an online learning management system that offers a variety of self-enroll courses for wildland fire professionals.
Fire in the Field
Fire in the Field online trainings are offered online or by CD-ROM, and are recognized by many states as NWCG training equivalents.
Southern Fire Exchange Online Resources
Southern Fire Exchange maintains a list of online resources, archived webinars, and trainings including NWCG and non-NWCG resources on topics including smoke management, general prescribed fire, and fire weather. Many resources listed on this page are also included on SFE’s list.
NACo County Wildfire Playbook
A County Leadership Guide to Help Communities Become More Fire Adapted and Learn to Live with Wildland Fire.
Introduction to Prescribed Fire in Southern Ecosystems
This USDA Forest Service publication is a guide for resource managers on planning and executing prescribed burns in Southern forests and grasslands. It includes explanations of reasons for prescribed burning, environmental effects, weather, and techniques as well as general information on prescribed burning.
The LANDFIRE Program
The LF Program provides 20+ national geo-spatial layers (e.g. vegetation, fuel, disturbance, etc.), databases, and ecological models that are available to the public for the US and insular areas.
National Wildfire Coordinating Group
National Wildfire Coordinating Group’s catalogue provides specific training for NWCG positions.
Basic Prescribed Fire Training
Extension Foundation Campus: Basic Prescribed Fire Training is an online course for landowners, land managers, state/federal agency personnel. In this course participants will develop a basic knowledge of the use, application and effects of prescribed fire. For more information or to enroll, contact John Weir, Oklahoma State University, at john.weir@okstate.edu
Introduction to Southeastern Prescribed Fire
Extension Foundation course: the course is designed to introduce students to the fundamental basics of prescribed burning in Southeastern forested ecosystems. At the end of the course the student will have a working knowledge of fire law, fire terminology, fire prescriptions, fire safety, firebreaks, smoke management and a basic understanding of how to conduct a prescribed burn. This course is not intended to take the place of state Certification courses, workshops, or experience in the field. Rather, it is intended to give students a basic understanding of the principles of prescribed fire and fire effects.
Northern Bobwhites and Fire: A Perfect Match
Prescribed fire, bobwhite ecology, and local site conditions need to be aligned for optimal bobwhite population response. This course discusses the context of fire frequency, scale, and seasonality for bobwhite management and restoration.
Wildland Fire Workspaces
Wildland Fire Workspaces offer a platform to enhance work flow and facilitate efficient sharing of ideas, datasets, products, publications, and more with others who have similar interests or missions. The Workspaces are bringing together a diverse set of individuals and expertise to promote dialogue and coordination.
Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity Interactive Viewer
The MTBS program was established to provide a consistent methodology to assess and document the effects of fire at a national scale. Since the program’s inception in 2005, MTBS mapping methods have evolved to accommodate changes and advancements in technology, software, satellite data and the availability of reliable fire occurrence data. It is anticipated these methods will continue to evolve into the future, however, the MTBS mapping approach has consistently occurred in five primary steps: 1. Fire Occurrence Data Compilation; 2. Landsat Scene Selection and Image Pre-processing; 3. Perimeter Delineation; 4. Burn Severity Interpretation; and 5. Data Distribution.
Pedoecological Modeling to Guide Forest Restoration using Ecological Site Descriptions
the u.s. department of agriculture (usda)-natural resources conservation service (nrcs) uses an ecological site description (esd) framework to help incorporate interactions between local soil, climate, flora, fauna, and humans into schema for land management decision-making. we demonstrate esd and digital soil mapping tools to (i) estimate potential o horizon carbon (c) stock accumulation from restoring alternative ecological states in high-elevation forests of the central appalachian Mountains in west Virginia (wV), usa, and (ii) map areas in alternative ecological states that can be targeted for restoration. this region was extensively disturbed by clear-cut harvests and related fires during the 1880s through 1930s. we combined spodic soil property maps, recently linked to historic red spruce–eastern hemlock (Picea rubens–Tsuga canadensis) forest communities, with current forest inventories to provide guidance for restoration to a historic reference state. this allowed mapping of alternative hardwood states within areas of the spodic shale uplands conifer forest (scF) ecological site, which is mapped along the regional conifer-hardwood transition of the central appalachian Mountains. Plots examined in these areas suggest that many of the spruce-hemlock dominated stands in wV converted to a hardwood state by historic disturbance have lost at least 10 cm of o horizon thickness, and possibly much more. Based on this 10 cm estimate, we calculate that at least 3.74 to 6.62 tg of c were lost from areas above 880 m elevation in wV due to historic disturbance of o horizons, and that much of these stocks and related ecosystem functions could potentially be restored within 100 yr under focused management, but more practical scenarios would likely require closer to 200 yr.
Reform forest fire management: Agency incentives undermine policy effectiveness
Globally, wildfire size, severity, and frequency have been increasing, as have related fatalities and taxpayer- funded firefighting costs (1). In most accessible forests, wildfire response prioritizes suppression because fires are easier and cheaper to contain when small (2). In the United States, for example, 98% of wildfires are suppressed before reaching 120 ha in size (3). But the 2% of wildfires that escape containment often burn under extreme weather conditions in fuel-loaded forests and account for 97% of fire-fighting costs and total area burned (3). Changing climate and decades of fuel accumulation make efforts to suppress every fire dangerous, expensive, and ill advised (4).
Medieval warming initiated exceptionally large wildfire outbreaks in the Rocky Mountains
Many of the largest wildfires in US history burned in recent decades, and climate change explains much of the increase in area burned. The frequency of extreme wildfire weather will increase with continued warming, but many uncertainties still exist about future fire regimes, including how the risk of large fires will persist as vegetation changes. Past fire-climate relationships provide an opportunity to constrain the related uncertainties, and reveal widespread burn- ing across large regions of western North America during past warm intervals. Whether such episodes also burned large portions of individual landscapes has been difficult to determine, however, because uncertainties with the ages of past fires and limited spatial resolution often prohibit specific estimates of past area burned. Accounting for these challenges in a subalpine landscape in Colorado, we estimated century-scale fire synchroneity across 12 lake- sediment charcoal records spanning the past 2,000 y. The percent- age of sites burned only deviated from the historic range of vari- ability during the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA) between 1,200 and 850 y B.P., when temperatures were similar to recent decades. Between 1,130 and 1,030 y B.P., 83% (median estimate) of our sites burned when temperatures increased ∼0.5 °C relative to the preceding centuries. Lake-based fire rotation during the MCA decreased to an estimated 120 y, representing a 260% higher rate of burning than during the period of dendroecological sampling (360 to −60 y B.P.). Increased burning, however, did not persist throughout the MCA. Burning declined abruptly before temperatures cooled, indicating possible fuel limitations to continued burning.
