By Billy Finn, DNR Communications
A Q&A with DNR forest health scientists and a prescribed fire planner to discuss wildfire in Washington.
Across Washington State, the threat of wildfire is real, and it is rising. As climate change accelerates, landscapes across the state—and the country—are experiencing longer, hotter, drier summers, leaving our forests and communities more vulnerable than ever.
While firefighters and responders continue to work to suppress these fires, forest health experts and scientists are racing to study them, to assess their impact on forests and ecosystems, and find ways in which we can work to limit the spread and severity of wildfires when they spark.
As it turns out, some of our most precious ecosystems may also hold the key to mitigating the worst outcomes of these fires: our older forests.
Recently, several members of DNR’s forest health science team helped co-author a paper entitled “Big Trees Burning,” an intensive study on how wildfires affect larger, older trees in Washington’s forests. Using the Schneider Springs Fire of 2021 as a case study, the authors discovered that the types of tree canopy and the prevalence of forest health treatments all impact the severity of wildfires. The paper could hold clues as to how DNR and its partners can more effectively treat forests and landscapes and protect them from catastrophic fires.
To discuss the paper and other key issues relating to the state of wildfire in Washington, EAR TO THE GROUND had a conversation with two of the paper’s co-authors—DNR forest health scientists Garrett Meigs and Derek Churchill—and Kate Williams, a DNR prescribed burn planner in the Forest Resilience Division.
*This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Q: The catalyst for this conversation is this paper that just came out. Garrett, talk to me a little bit about what inspired this research and this paper, and some of the key findings you were trying to uncover with this research.
GARRETT: This is an example of some of the applied research that we’ve been doing in our Forest Health Science team. Really, this came out of the wake of the 2021 fire season, which was a good-sized fire year. And that is what prompted this “Work of Wildfire” annual reporting that we’ve been doing each fire season since 2021.
That involves a lot of different ways to look at fire effects and how they’re changing the landscape and how they’re also influencing our overall restoration goals. But one of the interesting metrics we focused on is fire effects on large trees. So, this paper gets at that concept, and using one large wildfire—the Schneider Springs Fire, which was the largest forest fire of 2021—we were able to bring a bunch of different, high-quality datasets to bear and look at the impacts of that fire on large tree structure types.
We set it up with three overall objectives. First, we wanted to see how the fire severity patterns of that Schneider Springs Fire aligned with historical reference conditions, which are our estimates of what fire severity was historically in that landscape.
And then, secondly, to look at fire effects in different structure classes with large trees, medium trees, and small trees—especially teasing out differences between large trees with an open canopy and large trees with a closed canopy. That’s really the core focus of this paper. Those places with large trees and open canopies are often the desired outcome or goal of restoration treatments and fuel reduction treatments.
Our third objective was to look at treatments and how areas with and without treatments influenced fire severity as well.
So, we set it up that way, and this one large fire had something for everybody because of its size—there were large patches of high-severity fire where a lot of trees died. There were also a lot of areas with relatively low and moderate severity, and places with large trees that had relatively low severity compared to places with a closed canopy.
It’s one thing to overlay a burn severity map and talk about the amount of area burned in a given fire or year. But that’s really just skimming the surface. When you start to peel back the layers, you can say, “Well, how much of that was high-severity, moderate, and low?”
This is a neat case where we’re able to say, “Here are the actual ecological values on the ground that are influenced, in this case, focusing on those large trees.” And we know that large trees in these dry forests are especially important—really the backbone of the ecosystem. They’re important for habitat for all kinds of different species that depend on large-tree structures. They’re also more resistant and resilient to fire, drought, and insects. We really want to keep those large trees on the landscape.
So, this is a case where we can understand the conditions where large trees are more likely to survive, and therefore some of the management options that we have to help to increase their chance of survival. Because we know they’re going to burn at some point. It’s not really a question of if, but when.
Q: And that was going to be my next question. Derek, talk to me a little bit more about why these larger old-growth trees are so critical in terms of habitat and ecosystem, but also in terms of wildfire resilience, and why it’s so important to manage them?
DEREK: When you think about a system or forest that has a lot of fire, what enables a forest to maintain a lot of its functions is the ability for the trees to survive fire. We know larger trees have thicker bark, branches that are much higher up, and they can survive hotter fires better than smaller trees. So, when you lose the large trees, it’s much easier to get into a cycle where you lose most of the trees every fire. We call it a “high-severity cycle.”
So, that’s the first function—that resistance to fire. Large and old trees also produce a lot of seeds.
If you do get a fire that kills a lot of trees, but you still have a fair amount of those large trees left, they can provide a seed source for natural regeneration, which will help the forest recover. We don’t need to go in and plant as much, and then those systems are more resilient, more adaptive on their own.
These large trees are often old trees. Some of them are 150 years old, some even older. There’s a tremendous amount of genetic diversity in these older trees. Some of these trees grew up in cooler weather times, and some in hotter, drier times, and so the seed source that those trees put out has the genetic potential to survive—we think—in hotter and drier times.
This creates natural climate adaptation of the system. When you have a big fire, a lot of the trees die, and then the seeds that come out of these large old trees and some of those little seedlings are going to be more adapted to hotter and drier climates. It’s the forest’s way or the system’s way of naturally adapting to warmer and drier conditions.
We think about carbon storage in these forests. In a forest with a lot of fire, it’s not going to be the best place to store a lot of carbon. Our westside forests that have less fire have more potential for long-term carbon storage. For eastside forests, however, there’s quite a bit of research showing that you can store a decent amount of carbon in these large old trees and—because they’re better able to survive these wildfires—we have more stable carbon storage over time.
Q: Kate, your work at DNR involves building out the prescribed fire program. Explain to folks how there can be good kinds of fire and talk to me a little bit about how the prescribed fire program at DNR has evolved since you came on board.
KATE: Fires have always been on most of our landscapes. If we think about most ecosystems in North America, fire is often a maintenance element for those ecosystems. If we think of Washington State, fire is a natural part of our disturbance ecology cycle.
What fire does is take off the fuel layer on our ground. We don’t have another way to mimic that. And so prescribed fire keeps your layer of fuel on the ground low. The longer that you go without fire, the more that builds up—especially in a dry system where you don’t have the decomposition rates—you have more energy that’s stored in that system.
DNR has had a prescribed fire program for six years. The prescribed fire program is situated now with an all-lands focus. So, part of it is helping the state build up its expertise and build up its management to include prescribed fire.
A big component has been helping communities build up. The prescribed fire program essentially comes in and can give funding to those various landowners, advise them, and help burn. They’ve been standing up the Certified Burner Program, offering reduced liability to practitioners who go through the training and the certification. It’s boosting the workforce outside of the government system.
We’ve also been investing in prescribed burn associations, where it’s essentially communities, neighbors helping neighbors burn. You can see that the level of community involvement in the last six years has really expanded. We have even the westside now that’s thinking of expanding their prescribed fire components, and what that means on the westside. There’s just a lot of community activity that wasn’t previously there.
Q: It seems like prescribed burns or working collaboratively with fire is something that, for example, tribes have been doing for thousands and thousands of years. Why do you think it took so long for government institutions to invest in prescribed burn programs? And what are some of the impacts of a century of suppression-first practices?
KATE: To be frank, it’s a colonizer mindset and a military mindset. “Oh, that fire is an enemy that we can win.”
And the fires of 1910 out here in the West really shaped the U.S. Forest Services’ response to fire. We had the “10:00 a.m. policies” for a very long time, where fires needed to be put out by 10:00 a.m. the next day because we were in a resilient system at that time. It was much easier to suppress fire, and so it was just an easy win for 50-60 years.
As we start to realize the ecological implications, you slowly see the mindset shift, but you’ve trained an entire workforce to respond in a certain way.
Even now, if you look at DNR, half the battle is a mindset. Right now, the policy struggle that we have is that risk trade-off. If you go in and you put fire on the ground, there are certain risks that come with that. You’re accepting a certain level of responsibility for the fire that you’re trying to manage.
I think a big strength of this paper is really showing that wildfire can achieve a lot of the same targets that we’re trying to do by putting down prescribed fire. It doesn’t have to be one or the other. Wildfire—and good management during the wildfire—get you the same fire effects that you would have in a prescribed fire.
DEREK: A Karuk Tribal member put it well: Our culture has feared fire instead of viewing it as part of the system. Yes, it has burned down homes and devastated communities. But it is also essential to maintain these forests, grasslands, and vegetation. And if we understand and know how to use it, we can be its master.
For prescribed fire, it took a while to realize that by suppressing fire and managing these forests in a lot of different ways, they’re not in good condition in terms of forest health and wildfire risk. It took a while to figure that out. And then institutions are just slow to adapt.
And then prescribed fire presents this huge challenge. It involves risk and produces smoke. We’re actually doing less prescribed fire in Washington overall than we were 15 years ago.
Hopefully, that will change. DNR and private landowners are doing more, but it’s a slow build-up. We’re not at a place where we’re really doing prescribed fire on a lot of acres. I think that’s something we have to come to terms with.
It’s a long road to get to the place where we could do the amount of burning we need to do. One of the premises of our 20-Year Forest Health Plan is that there’s a large restoration need, and part of that is the treatment of surface fuels and reducing fire risk by treating surface fuels.
Q: And that leads sort of into my next question about management and the importance of it in keeping our forests healthy. For people who advocate locking away our forests, make the case for actively managing our forests. Not only in terms of wildfire, but in terms of habitat protection, in terms of ecosystem watershed resilience, and things like that.
KATE: Washington right now is in a bit of a delicate time where we can really invest and protect our state investments, not just with forests on the landscape, but there’s a lot of downstream impacts if we have high-severity fire come in. It’s a bigger ecosystem than just the forest on the landscape. It’s protecting our infrastructure, protecting our waterways.
There were impacts from high-severity fires that are not even directly related to forests on the landscape, but there’s just a lot of impact that can come about when you lose the forest. I think that’s a case for active management.
Once you lose the big trees, once you lose that forest, you’re going into a different system. You’re starting over.
DEREK: In the westside old forests, fire plays a role in that system, but—in general—if we want to protect old-growth forests in the westside, you can just leave them alone. And maybe we do need fire, but it’s very different than eastern Washington, where you really have a fire-dependent ecosystem that is adapted to frequent fire. Active management really applies to these fire-dependent forests.
These forests historically had a lot of disturbance, and a lot of that was fire. A lot of that was Indigenous burning, and so the whole system’s adapted to that kind of regular disturbance. When you take that away, these forests densify—you get a lot more trees growing in, and then that just sets them up for that bigger, high-severity event, whether that’s insects or fire.
A lot of the reasons or motivation behind “let’s lock forests up” is that people don’t trust forest management and they think it’s all about timber production. They look at the way some forests are managed for timber production with a very intensive, clear-cut plantation model, and they say, “Well, it’s not protecting old trees, that’s not going to create more resilient landscapes.” And to be honest, they’re right.
And so, what I think our division—and a lot of other people—has tried to do is to say that you can steward or manage forests in a way that is explicitly trying to create more fire-resistant forests, as part of a mix with economic and ecological objectives.
When you do that, you can create healthier forests that are more resistant over time and help protect communities. You can do all the thinning or forest management that you want in terms of reducing density and cutting trees and planting trees, but if you don’t treat the surface fuels—the wood, the branches, the litter, and the fine fuels on the ground—you’re not reducing wildfire risk that much.
And so, when people say we need to manage the forest to protect it from wildfire, part of that management should be reducing the surface fuels. Many landowners aren’t doing that surface fuel reduction. There’s still a lot of significant risk in a lot of forests, even though they’re being managed.
GARRETT: Our program really does the “All Lands, All Hands” 20-Year Forest Health Strategic Plan. We’re supporting a lot of different partners to design and implement projects and then monitor, so we’re not making management decisions for DNR lands.
But we’re trying to provide good, science-based information for understanding ecological objectives and fire risk reduction objectives. A lot of times, the types of management activities that make the most sense in these dry forest landscapes are the ones that retain large tree structures to create more of an open forest canopy and then reduce those surface fuels.
That’s the structural condition that we were able to map and quantify the outcomes of large fires and reinforce what we already knew from the science that those types of forests tend to do better when wildfire comes through. The large trees tend to survive more than in a place with a closed-canopy, dense forest.
Q: The bulk of your work seems to focus mostly on eastern Washington. We’re starting to see some changes at the landscape level in western Washington as well. What are the changes you have seen over the course of your work at DNR? Are you seeing an increase in wildfires? And, in terms of adaptive management, the Forest Health Strategic Plan is specific to eastern Washington, but could we start to see some of these adaptive management practices happen in western Washington?
DEREK: We just released a strategic plan for western Washington.
Although we are seeing an increase in the amount of fire on the westside, it’s still way less fire than in eastern Washington. Historically, we’ve had large fires in western Washington—they just don’t happen that often. It’s just a real challenge with the hotter, drier summers. Also, drier springs. The forests are drying out earlier in the spring and in the early summer, and so we are seeing that period where westside fires can burn; where it’s dry enough to burn is getting longer or starting earlier.
It’s not clear how big an increase that really is. My feeling on the westside is that we’re starting to figure out where the communities are that may be more at risk of these large fires and working with people to invest in defensible space, home hardening, and the evacuation kind of disaster preparedness.
And that’s probably the best thing we can do right now in terms of westside fire, rather than trying to manage the landscape to reduce fire risk like we’re doing in eastern Washington. The system’s different, and we’re nowhere near where it’s dry enough to where it’s like eastern Washington. So, that idea of vast, landscape-level treatments risk reduction just doesn’t make sense.
Both historically and today, we should start figuring out how we might manage some of these areas more like those of eastern Washington forests. We maybe try to introduce fire. We manage for an understory that is more conducive to frequent fire.
So, we have a lot to learn about how to do that and what that looks like, and you think prescribed fire is hard in eastern Washington? Well, it’s even harder over here.
GARRETT: I think the last few years have been a real wake-up call for fire on the westside. 2022 had more fires on the west side and fewer fires on the east side.
So, within this “Work of Wildfire” framework, we developed a parallel set of metrics to understand fire outcomes and some of the beneficial or negative effects of fire that are more specific to western Washington. That has been a helpful framework, and we’re more prepared for the next fire season when we’ll have fires on either side of the state.
Q: In the last legislative session, the Legislature cut DNR’s wildfire and forest health prevention funding by more than half. How has this funding helped you do your work, and what potential impacts could you start seeing if this funding isn’t restored?
KATE: The primary thing that I would point out with the loss of this funding is workforce. If we think of just our workforce and our scheduling, wildfire season is stretching out. If we wanted to take advantage of the shorter windows for prescribed fires, that’s getting further and further out. We need flexible funding like 1168 to fund workforces, to keep our staff on, so that we go beyond that six-month season. But there are some logistical challenges to essentially tackling this work as wildfire season itself expands.
With 1168 going away, a lot of our prescribed fire program funding is reduced.
We have travel restrictions, so people aren’t as able to do their jobs as widely and provide that service to the public. There are some very tangible reductions in service that both wildfire and forest resilience will be able to offer the public.
As we scaled up these programs, we made a lot of promises for what we’d be able to offer. If the Legislature doesn’t give us that funding, a lot of those services will be reduced.
DEREK: Our division tracks all of the treatments happening in eastern Washington, and we’ve seen a gradual increase in the amount of treatment.
The 20-Year Plan got launched, and then COVID hit and scrambled things, but certainly in 2023 and 2024, we were overall on track. At least with density reduction treatments like thinning the forest, we can see how we’re going to get there with the 20-Year Plan. It’s a hopeful thing.
We could avoid winding up like California, and we could get our forests in better shape to deal with wildfire, forest health, and climate. But the loss of this funding—combined with the loss of federal funding—we’re just going to see those treatment numbers drop, and we’re really jeopardizing our future forests.
In Washington, after we had those two big fire seasons in 2014 and 2015, we got this long-term, 20-Year Plan, and we’re off to a great start, and we’re really leaders in the West. But just when we’re really ramping up, now we’re going to cut ourselves at the knees. This will have impacts. Just look at California. Look at all these other states that waited until it was a total crisis.
GARRETT: We have these monitoring and research applications as part of our job, and 1168 funding has enabled really important research partnerships to learn about the effects of wildfire. In fact, there’s a companion paper that goes with our “Big Trees Burning” paper. And it built upon another paper that’s called “Learning from Wildfires.”
This research team developed a framework to evaluate treatment effectiveness in a really robust way, and we were able to use the treatment database that was developed for that paper for our “Big Trees Burning” paper. It was a direct connection, and that research was directly supported by the 1168 funds, and now we’re carrying it forward with other research partners to be able to assess treatment effectiveness each year.
Thanks to Garrett Meigs, Derek Churchill, and Kate Williams for taking the time to discuss their work. To learn more, visit DNR’s Prescribed Fire Program webpage and read the full “Big Trees Burning” paper.
