Wildlife habitat management ranks high among Pennsylvania supporters of controlled fires – also known as prescribed burns – according to a new Penn State study of public perception of the landscape management technique.
In New Jersey, where the Pine Barren forests experience wildfires that can threaten areas of human populations, supporters of controlled fires rank reducing fire risk as a higher priority.
Setting planned, controlled fires can do both, but the researchers wanted to gain a deeper understanding of how to win public support for prescribed burns in the Mid-Atlantic, where the fires are increasingly used.
“We are moving to a more uncertain future where fire risk is larger, and one of the tools that managers have in their toolbox is prescribed fire,” explained Erica Smithwick, distinguished professor of geography and associate director of the Institutes of Energy and the Environment at Penn State. “It’s important to work at the interface between managers and communities in order to sustainably steward our landscapes moving forward, especially under uncertainty.”
Public understanding of the use of controlled burns is growing, but still developing in Pennsylvania. While last week’s forest fire burned in Elk County – the heart of the Pennsylvania Elk Range – misinformation began circulating that linked the wildfire to a controlled burn by the Pennsylvania Game Commission. The agency quickly responded by noting that it had not done a controlled burn in the area of the forest fire.
To help managers better understand community perceptions of controlled burns, the researchers surveyed forest managers and recreationists in New Jersey, a state that has practiced prescribed burns for more than 100 years, and in Pennsylvania, which adopted the practice in 2009.
While the study revealed strong community support for prescribed burning, views of specific concerns and benefits differed between managers and recreationists and between recreationists in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, the scientists reported in the Journal of Environmental Management.
“These results highlighted needs in public outreach to strengthen education, build broader community awareness, engage critical stakeholder groups such as forest recreationists and realign public outreach messages based on community-level concerns and perceived benefits,” said Hong Wu, an associate professor of landscape architecture at Penn State and lead author on the study.
Prescribed fires can help maintain biodiversity in habitats like the forests found in the Mid-Atlantic and kill invasive species and pests like ticks, the scientists said. For example, managers in Pennsylvania use prescribed burns to maintain habitats favored by game animals like deer.
These burns also clear underbrush that otherwise could accumulate and fuel more intense wildfires that can kill trees and destroy homes. While many of the country’s largest fires occur in the Western U.S., wildfire risk remains a serious concern in the more densely populated Mid-Atlantic.
Pennsylvania is fifth in the country in wildland urban interface, which measures the intermingling of people in fire-prone landscapes, according to Smithwick, who is also director of the Center for Landscape Dynamics and an associate of the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute.
“While fires might happen less frequently here than in the west, if it does happen, it could have a great impact because a lot of people are living in these landscapes,” she noted.
Climate change may increase those risks, according to the researchers. Weather extremes in the eastern U.S., for example, may lead to wetter and drier periods, allowing more underbrush to grow during the wet times and that extra fuel to dry and potentially burn during dry times.
“There are different reasons why people would be motivated to be accepting or concerned about fire, and parsing that was the purpose of this study,” Smithwick said. “We found that indeed there are differences and that they vary across state lines, largely due to differences in policies and people’s awareness of fire and beliefs toward it.”
The researchers met with land managers at a workshop sponsored by the Center for Landscape Dynamics, and the study was driven by their concerns about public perception of introducing fire onto landscapes in Pennsylvania.
“The managers we talk to want to be good neighbors, good stewards of the land,” Smithwick said. “There’s a strong interest in communicating why they are doing the work they are doing. They want people to understand the complexity and the opportunities for managing these landscapes more efficiently and sustainably.”
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Also, you can contact Marcus Schneck at mschneck@pennlive.com.