FACT: Montana has 22.4 million acres of forest.

FACT: Of this total, 3.4 million acres are in parks, wilderness areas or other reserves.

FACT: Of the non-reserve acreage in Montana (19 million acres) 16% or 3 million acres is in the ponderosa pine (p-pine) type.

ASSUMPTION: It is assumed that mean fire intervals (MFI) on average in p-pine forests are 10 years (varying between 7-25 years) from several fire history studies. One must be clear of several facts in p-pine systems. MFI is not necessarily "natural", that is, fire historians have not been able to conclude if this frequency was "natural" or was a result of Native American intervention. Thus, driving the system towards "natural" is unknowable. Driving the system to "pre-settlement" as a goal is fine, if you understand that it may not be "natural", but a human induced system created by Native Americans.

With that said, if you want to return to an MFI of 10 years in Ponderosa Pine in Montana, then 300,000 acres of Ponderosa Pine must burn each year, change it to a 20 year MFI and still 150,000 acres must burn each year to retain this forest type within its historical pre-settlement fire frequency. It is assumed that this would then assure this forest type won't develop into "catastrophic" fire conditions.

NOTE: However, all p-pine forests are not the same. There is ample evidence, over six scientific articles, that indicate that p-pine forests had stand replacing fires in pre-settlement conditions (see reference section). Thus, p-pine forests were never homogeneous open park-like stands everywhere. This points out that the fire history of a particular landscape should be known before developing goals for fire frequency and intensity for its particular forest types like p-pine.

FACT: Prior to 1994, national forest managers in Montana set fire to about 10,000 acres a year in all forest types.

FACT: By 1997, that number was up to 35,000 acres in all forest types.

With these facts and assumptions, we can now debate the costs and benefits of an increased prescribed fire program (5-10 fold) in one of the least extensive forest types in Montana. If we were to also include douglas fir forests, whitebark pine, etc. you soon see what the agencies (and the private industrial forests sector) will have to do to keep our systems "natural". Extend this across the West and it soon becomes evident that it is impossible for people to control nature. Human control, starting and extinguishing fires, in all fire prone ecosystems in the West is impossible and economically infeasible.

When the wildfires go out, hopefully we can sit down and make a solid, sane affordable policy. One that relies primarily on prescribed natural fires with small amounts of judicious thinning and prescribed burning where the goals and objectives are clear (i.e., do we want pre-settlement human induced fire frequencies?) and it is demonstrable that a surface burn is desirable and achievable after expensive treatments.

Hopefully, this will be coupled with the use of fire suppression primarily to protect human life, important structures and important habitat (such as for endangered species).

REFERENCES:

Arno, S.F, J.H. Scott and M.G. Hartwell. 1995. Age-class structure of old growth ponderosa pine/Douglas fir stands and its relationship to fire history. U.S. Forest Service Research Paper INT-RP-481.

Brown, P.M., M.R. Kaufmann and W.D. Sheppard. 1999. Long-term landscape patterns of past fire events in a montane ponderosa pine forest of central Colorado. Landscape Ecology 14:513-532.

Brown, P.M. and C.H. Sieg. 1996. Fire history in interior ponderosa pine communities of the Black Hills, South Dakota, U.S.A.

International Journal of Wildland Fire 6:97-105.

Shinneman, D.J. and W.L. Baker. 1997. Nonequilibrium dynamics between catastrophic disturbances and old-grwoth forests in ponderoas pine landscapes of the Black Hills. Conservation Biology 11: 1276-1288.

Swetnam, T.W. and C.H. Baisan. 1996. Historical fire regime patterns in the southwestern United States since A.D. 1700. Pages 11-32 in C.D. Allen, editor. Fire effects in southwestern forests. Proceedings of the second La Mesa fire symposium. U.S. Forest Service General Technical Report RM-286.

Veblen, T.T., T. Kitzberger and J. Donnegan. 2000. Climatic and human influences on fire regimes in ponderosa pine forests in the Colorado front range. Ecological Applications 10(4):1178-1195.