Fire Management Options

Buckner and Turill (1999) outlined three fire management options for the southern Appalachians. They note that an ecosystem managers choice of a path to follow should be determined only after defining the desired future condition for the landscape.

Option 1: Support a policy of fire suppression with few or no management-ignited fires.
This option will increase hardwood dominance, continue homogenization of the landscape, and lead to rapid loss of biodiversity.

Option 2: Maintain selected areas of fire-associated and fire-dependent species.
This option would maintain small "token" patches of fire-dependent species. This approach will also be used by the research community to establish guidelines for fire use and behavior. Burning areas would be surrounded by artificial boundaries such as roads and fire lines. The result would be a dissected, patchy landscape with sharp boundaries between treated and untreated areas. This option would not maintain the full range of seral conditions required to maximize biodiversity.

Option 3: Burn entire watersheds containing a wide range of aspect and topographic conditions.
In this treatment, a watershed would be randomly chosen for firing at random intervals representing a wide range of burning conditions. Fires would be confined to individual watershed by natural boundaries such as streams and ridgelines. Within the watershed, however, no attempt would be made to control fires. This option would maintain the widest range in seral stages and result in maximum biodiversity. It would, in the long run, maintain an aesthetically pleasing landscape containing the full range of ecotones between diverse landscape conditions (open meadows, grassy balds, large trees in old forests, etc). However, these ecological, wildlife and aesthetic benefits would be gained at the expense of reduced yield forest products. Valuable timber would be grown only in valley bottoms, on lower north and east slopes, and in yellow pine stands on some upper southwest slopes.