Webinar Series
Fire Use Around the World: Purposes, Principles, Policies, and Practices
The first webinar in the series is titled "A worldwide view of the roles, status, and future of prescribed fire" and will feature Marc Castellnou (Fire Department of Catalonia, Spain), Paulo Fernandes (Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro, Portugal), Morgan Varner (Tall Timbers, USA) and Luisa Alfaro (United States Agency for International Development, Costa Rica).
In the inaugural seminar of this series, four fire experts will provide an overview of prescribed fire from different viewpoints, disciplines, and regions. They will discuss the role of prescribed fire in ecosystems, connections to culture and community, best practices and performance metrics for evaluating outcomes, and they will speculate on the future of prescribed fire. This overview will provide a foundation for future seminars, each of which will cover these topics in greater depth.
Webinar Series
The Webinar Series is organized and supported by California Prescribed Fire Monitoring Program, a collaboration between CalFire and the Safford Lab at the University of California-Davis; and the California Fire Science Consortium.
Controlling fire was the first major technological advance made by early humans. These days, fire is still used as a management tool, but (usually!) under more prescribed conditions than in the Paleolithic. Prescribed fire is carried out in many different countries, by a wide variety of people, under a wide variety of circumstances. It is used on all of the inhabited continents, by trained professional personnel, resource managers, researchers, ranchers and farmers, pastoralists, indigenous peoples, and private citizens. Among other things, prescribed fire can maintain or alter ecosystems, create or destroy habitat, promote wildlife populations or livestock populations, control weedy plants or liberate native species, restore ecosystems, and meet important sociocultural needs. And after a century of more of repression, fire use in management is experiencing a renaissance. Taken in sum, there is a huge diversity in prescribed burning purposes, principles, policies, and practices that can serve to incentivize and inform fire use around the world. In this webinar series, we present a survey of prescribed fire from around the globe, focused on seven topic areas: fuel management; rangeland and landscape management; management of production forests; wildlife management; monitoring and datasets; and ecological restoration and cultural fire.
Spring 2024 Schedule
February 27, 2024: Worldwide view on prescribed fire. Where are we?
April 2, 2024: Preparing for the “big one”: prescribed fire as a strategic fuel reduction tool
April 23, 2024: Traditional and long-time use of prescribed fire
