Fire in the Woods

- Hi, Sanford Smith here with Penn State Extension.

I'm joined by my colleague Jesse Kreye in the Department of Ecosystem Science and Management here at Penn State.

We're gonna talk a little bit about fire in the woods, fires here in Pennsylvania and the Northeast.

Jesse, what can you tell me about the fires that occur in the forests here?

Well, Sandy, there's different kinds of fires that occur in our forest.

And I think the one that most people think of, the general public, are wildfires.

And those are fires that can come through under very dry and windy conditions and can cause problems or unintentional fires that occur.

- Right.

- Sometimes there's damage to the forest, if it's, you know, fires occur under kind of dangerous conditions.

- Yeah.

- But those are kind of the fires that many people think of when they hear about that there was a wildfire in the forest near them.

- Sure. So, Jesse, wildfires, do they just happen?

What's the main, is there a main way they occur?

And then also, what times of year are particularly important to watch out for them?

- Sure. Well, wildfires can occur what we would say, either naturally or by humans.

Lightning can cause fires and there's parts of the country where lightning is a pretty common source for fires to start.

But most of the fires that occur in our neck of the woods, if you will, in our eastern forest, are human caused.

And although fires can happen any time of year, they're most common in the northeast and the mid-Atlantic region in the spring and in the fall.

And so, in the spring, most common around March and April and May, and that's because it's starting to warm up, days are getting longer, there's plenty of leaf litter on the forest floor that can burn and during this time of year, there's no leaves on the trees.

So, when it starts to get warmer, the sun can shine right on the forest floor and heat up the fuels, if you will on the forest floor and make it hotter and drier.

And it's much more open if it's a windy day where wind can carry a fire.

- Sure. Yeah.

Now, there's another type of fire that I hear about, it's called prescribed fire.

What's the deal with those?

- Correct. So, that's one thing I think that people who aren't familiar with prescribed burning or what you might call controlled burning is that fire actually plays a really important role in many of our forests in the eastern US, particularly in our Oak-hickory forest.

And so, fires can recycle nutrients by burning up the leaf litter and recycling the nutrients into the soil.

It can actually keep the forest floor more open, allowing the mature adult trees to regenerate on the forest floor.

And many of our big oak trees, for example, have nice thick bark and are accustomed to regular, what we'd say, low intensity burns.

And so, we've recognized the role that fire has played for a long time in our part of the world.

And agencies and land managers are starting to use fire more often intentionally but under controlled conditions, during conditions where it's not really dry, where it's not really windy, just dry enough to be able to get the job done, if you will but not to burn under dangerous conditions where a fire can get away and cause problems.

- Yeah. I've heard people are using fire to sometimes set back invasive plants in their woods as well as perhaps reduce the tick population in that area.

Any thoughts on that?

- Yeah. So, fires is commonly used to try and deal with invasive plant species that we have more and more of these days, invasive shrubs, for example, fire is one tool that can be used in the toolbox to try and mitigate and keep those back.

It can often be used as well to keep the understory open to improve herbaceous plants to come in, which are really good forage for a lot of animals.

For example, deer.

And you mentioned ticks.

Many of us think and I have some research on this showing that places that do burn regularly, there tend to be less ticks.

- A little dryer maybe and just their understory has been removed, right?

Where they tend to hang out when they're not on a host.

- Yes. So, you know, on the one hand, you might think, well, a fire could impact ticks by killing them during the fire.

But important part that we're finding is that, fires, particularly fires are used on 'em on a regular basis makes it less inhabitable for ticks.

- Yeah. - On the ground.

Because it's hotter and drier at the surface of the forest floor, which ticks don't actually like.

- Yeah. Well, thank you, Jesse, for joining me today.

And thank you, folks.

We hope you learned a little bit about wildfires as well as prescribed fires.

Thank you very much for listening.