It’s springtime and smoke is in the air as landowners and managers take advantage of seasonal weather conditions to reduce fuels and improve forest and range health with prescribed fire.
While most private landowners primarily burn ditches, fields and piles of brush, there is an increasing desire to burn sizable chunks of ground. To support this movement, a partnership between Oregon Department of Forestry and OSU Extension developed a program called IGNITE Prescribed Burn Skills Training to provide hands-on training to diverse participants, including Certified Burn Manager trainees, anyone else who wants to learn about fire ecology and science, prescribed fire unit layout, firing and holding techniques, monitoring weather, and operating pumps and fire engines.
Attendees at the first NE Oregon IGNITE training learn from experts how to dig line on a prescribed fire.
The IGNITE training was open to anyone interested and held in early June on a private ranch owned by Peter Ferre’. He said he’d been aware of the power and relevance of prescribed fire as a tool, like timber harvest and thinning and offered his land for the training.
Ferre’ said, “I’ve worked really hard to manage the fire risk on my timber land, but the way I’m managing the fire risk is like sitting on a two-legged stool and the third leg necessary is prescribed fire.”
Ferre’ said he has long researched the uses and benefits of prescribed fire, understanding the risks - and the smoke. Recently, he said he witnessed some aspects of fire that took his understanding beyond the papers and articles he read.
“Four to five years ago we had a small, unintended fire at the ranch,” Ferre said. “Since then, the positive impact on that little stand of timber is amazing - how well it cleaned up the understory of that little area, and since then I’ve walked that hill and I have oregon grape, serviceberry wild rose, strawberry and other native plants that were not there previously, flourishing”
The discovery of Medusahead rye on his ranch is one more reason Ferre’ said he is eager to use fire as a land management tool. For this and some other specific species, specific timing/use of prescribed fire can kill seeds and reduce re-establishment. “My desire is to have the ranch be a place for learning,” Ferre’ said. “I’ve benefited so much from this ground that I’d like it to benefit others.”
Understanding the relationship between fire and land management is a keen interest of Micah Schmidt, OSU Extension regional fire specialist, who said one of the benefits of prescribed fire is restoring the human relationship with fire.
“For more than 100 years fire has been seen as destructive, and people who have lived through a wildfire have trauma and fear the next wildfire,” Schmidt said. “Seeing prescribed fire on the land can help the healing process.”
Over 70 partners in the Northern Blues came together last fall to learn more about prescribed fire implementation and participate in a small burn.
Despite the fear and trauma, Schmidt said, humans have evolved to use fire to manage their land and in turn, their food sources. “Like many cultures in the world, we still like fire in some way,” Schmidt said, “and when you put a drip torch in someone’s hands, they get excited.” A drip torch is one of the ignition devices used in prescribed fire. It uses a diesel and gasoline mix of fuel and when the wick of the metal can is lit, the operator walks along igniting fine ground fuels like grass, dead twigs and small limbs.
Carefully returning fire to the ecosystem, especially over hundreds and thousands of acres, is part of restoring natural processes. Low and moderate severity fire cleans up pockets of dead wood, reduces encroaching trees and brush and can help protect and promote older, large trees and those best adapted to surviving wildfires, like the ponderosa pine and Western larch. This is considered best practice for land managers today when it comes to using fire as a management tool, and a growing and evolving practice adopted by agencies following large conflagrations like the 1988 Yellowstone National Park fires.
“As we head into fire season, we’re focused on safety, readiness, and interagency coordination,” said Jess Bohnsack, Fire Management Officer for the Wallowa-Whitman’s North Zone for the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest. “With hazardous fuels build-up across the West and here locally, treating more acres is better than treating fewer to achieve our goals."
The goals when using prescribed fire are varied depending on the project including objectives that benefit forest health by reducing the risk of wildfire destroying large swaths of trees and sensitive species as well as protecting and improving wildlife habitat.
A broadcast prescribed burn in the Lower Joseph Creek Project on the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest in April 2025.
Todd Pedersen, the North Zone’s assistant fire management officer who focuses on prescribed fire, said some vegetation is adapted and responds well to burning. While some species are more fire resilient, like ponderosa pine, removing some of the understory also benefits the larger landscape. Pedersen said, “If we are trying to mimic nature, some of our fires not only reduce fuel loading, but support fire expressing itself on the landscape with many results.”
Most of the trees killed in a prescribed fire are small in diameter, but occasionally larger trees die, leaving a “snag” - a desirable dead tree - that is an underrepresented habitat for woodpeckers, nuthatches, bluebirds and owls as well as raccoons and squirrels.
After a prescribed fire some vegetation, like lodgepole pine regenerates, while others, like the wood lily, thrive. Resilient shrubs and other forage become more accessible and palatable for deer, elk and cattle after a low or moderate intensity fire.
Oregon Department of Forestry fire crews don’t typically manage large-scale understory prescribed fires, but are called on to burn large slash piles, another type of prescribed fire, on private industrial timber land or support crews like The Nature Conservancy who support burning on federal, tribal, and private lands. Department of Forestry fire crews are often called to back up Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management crews as well when they burn public forest and range land.
Whether prescribed fires are lit by federal agencies or private landowners, the Department of Forestry helps monitor and mitigate smoke emissions along with the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality. ODF Wallowa Unit Forester Tracy Brostrom said, “We encourage landowners to turn in a smoke management plan so the state knows how much smoke is going to be in the air.”
Along with smoke management, careful planning, coordination of resources, weather observations, and monitoring after the fire ensures prescribed fire can continue to be a safe and effective tool for managing healthy landscapes.