NASA data shows that, as our global climate changes and temperatures rise, extreme wildfires have become more frequent, intense, and larger over the last 21 years. While fires have become more frequent nationwide, some of the largest increases in extreme fire behavior have been observed across the Western U.S. and northern North America.
At the same time, native landscapes face other environmental disturbances. Invasive vegetation, pests, diseases, and other ecological stressors increasingly affect habitats such as prairies, savannas, forests, and wetlands. Ongoing human interaction with the landscape and the ongoing expansion of the wildland-urban interface drive these impacts.
Wildland fire mitigation strategies can help address these pressures by restoring and maintaining native landscapes, supporting healthy habitats, enhancing ecosystem function, and promoting biodiversity.
What Are Wildland Fire Mitigation Land Management Strategies?
Wildland fire mitigation landscape plans reduce wildfire risk through an integrated approach to landscape design, invasive vegetation management, and land management planning. They can include an annual and seasonal routine maintenance plan, defensible space planting plan, and a prescribed fire management plan.
Routine maintenance, such as leaf and debris removal, tree pruning, and invasive vegetation management, can help deter wildfire spread. Clearing combustible debris from around buildings, eaves, and rooftops reduces the chance that embers will develop into flames. Trees regularly pruned of dead, diseased, or hazardous limbs are less likely to capture embers and ignite, which can spread fire quickly. Removing invasive vegetation, which can grow rapidly and abundantly, reduces excess fuel buildup.
Defensible landscaping practices manage trees, shrubs, and other plants around infrastructure, reducing fuel connectivity, slowing fire development, and reducing damage. Defensible landscaping guidelines reduce flammable vegetation around a building and prioritize planting low-growth, high-moisture perennials.
A prescribed fire clears hazardous vegetation from a grassland or forest to reduce available fuel. This also allows the use of fire during conditions that are prescribed by a fire practitioner, mitigating dangerous fire effects.
Together, these practices can help reduce the risk of damage to homes and businesses in high wildfire-risk areas.
Beyond Wildfire Reduction
While wildland fire mitigation strategies primarily focus on reducing fire risk, they also strengthen overall ecosystem resilience.
A properly executed prescribed fire management plan provides a range of ecological benefits, including removing excess biomass, mitigating invasive plant species and pests, improving nutrient cycling, promoting native plant growth, sequestering carbon, and reducing hazardous fuels. Routine maintenance and defensible landscaping practices reduce safety hazards beyond fire, like storm damage.
Davey Resource Group’s team of experts is well-versed in wildland fire mitigation landscaping strategies and can help clients meet their ecological and operational goals. Follow this link to a recorded webinar on how to incorporate Prescribed Burning as a Vegetation Management Tool. To learn more about wildfire mitigation, contact your local Davey office.
Wildfire Management FAQs
Wildland fire mitigation landscaping practices are land management strategies designed to reduce wildfire risk and limit the potential spread of fire across a property. By managing flammable vegetation and reducing hazardous fuels, landowners can address wildfire risk while incorporating broader ecological land management objectives, such as maintaining native plant communities and supporting ecosystem resilience.
Invasive vegetation management can reduce wildfire risk by removing plant material that may contribute to hazardous fuel loads and fire spread. Some invasive species can create accumulations of dry, flammable biomass that alter natural fire behavior. Integrating invasive species management with routine vegetation maintenance and ecological restoration can support both wildfire mitigation and longer-term goals for habitat quality, biodiversity, and ecosystem function.
Defensible landscaping is the strategic management of trees, shrubs, and other vegetation around buildings and infrastructure to reduce fire development and slow wildfire spread, reducing potential damage. This approach typically involves reducing areas receptive to embers, which are areas of easily ignitable vegetation and pockets of vegetative debris in close proximity to buildings. Defensible space means managing plant spacing and condition, removing dead or hazardous material, and prioritizing species with characteristics such as low-growing, high-moisture perennials, allowing responders space to defend property.
Prescribed fire can support wildfire mitigation and ecological restoration by intentionally reducing excess vegetation and replicating historic fire processes under planned conditions. When designed and implemented appropriately, prescribed fire can reduce hazardous fuels, manage certain invasive species and pests, cycle nutrients, and encourage native plant growth. These ecological land management benefits can improve habitat conditions and support biodiversity while reducing the biomass available to fuel future wildfires. Prescribed fire should be incorporated into a broader land management plan that considers site conditions, ecological objectives, applicable regulations, safety requirements, and ongoing vegetation management.
Wildland fire mitigation land management can improve ecosystem resilience by combining wildfire risk reduction with practices that maintain healthier, more functional landscapes. Tree pruning, invasive vegetation management, defensible landscaping, and prescribed fire integrated into long-term land management planning can support native vegetation, biodiversity, nutrient cycling, habitat quality, and carbon sequestration.
Article Contributors:
Cary Hulse, Manager, Urban Forestry, Wetland Studies & Solutions, Inc.
Corine Peugh, Principal Consultant, Davey Resource Group, Northern Ohio
Thomas Becker, Senior Project Manager, Davey Resource Group, Northern Ohio
