User:DandelionShortbread/Controlled burn

State your Plan/Objectives for improving the Wiki-article (this can be a few sentences or a list)

- First the introduction just seems clunky and could use some flow

- Citations either need to be replaced or better explained. Thoughts and explanations of data are often incomplete.

- Seems to be a biased framing

- Thinking about adding a section that includes benefits of using controlled burns. Maybe a bulleted list?

- sections need to be reorganized. The forest use is huge but the agriculture use is tiny. Bach burning goes on for too long.

-Lacking historical context around colonization and how it greatly impacted land management in the west

Back Burning
Back burning is the process of starting a controlled burn and letting it burn backwards towards an oncoming wildfire. This technique slows the spread of the wildfire and removes possible fuel.

Pile Burn

Driptorch/ Helitorch

Forest use

Another consideration is the issue of fire prevention. In Florida, during the drought in 1995, catastrophic wildfires burned numerous homes. Each year, additional leaf litter and dropped branches increased the likelihood of a hot and uncontrollable fire.

Controlled burns are sometimes ignited using a tool known as the driptorch, which allows a steady stream of flaming fuel to be directed to the ground as needed. Variations on the driptorch can be used such as the helitorch, which is mounted on a helicopter, or other improvised devices such as mounting a driptorch-like device on the side of a vehicle. A pyrotechnic device known as a fusee can be used for ignition in nearby fuels while a flare gun can be used to ignite fuels farther away.[citation needed]

Pile burn

For the burning of slash, waste materials left over from logging, there are several types of controlled burns. Broadcast burning is the burning of scattered slash over a wide area. Pile burning is gathering up the slash into piles before burning. These burning piles may be referred to as bonfires. High temperatures can harm the soil, damaging it physically, chemically or sterilizing it. Broadcast burns tend to have lower temperatures and will not harm the soil as much as pile burning, though steps can be taken to treat the soil after a burn. In lop and scatter burning, slash is left to compact over time, or is compacted with machinery. This produces a lower intensity fire, as long as the slash is not packed too tightly. However, soil may be damaged if machinery is used to compress the slash.[citation needed]

Controlled burning reduces fuels, may improve wildlife habitat, controls competing vegetation, improves short term forage for grazing, improves accessibility, helps control tree disease, and perpetuates fire dependent species. In mature longleaf pine fores t, it helps maintain habitat for endangered red-cockaded woodpeckers in their sandhill and flatwoods habitats. Fire is also felt to be a crucial element of the recovery of the threatened Louisiana pine snake in the longleaf pine forests of central Louisiana and eastern Texas. To improve the application of prescribed burns for conservation goals, which may involve mimicking historical or natural fire regimes, scientists assess the impact of variation in fire attributes. Fire frequency is the most discussed fire attribute in the scientific literature, likely because it is considered the most critical fire regime aspect. Scientists less often report data concerning the effects of variation in other fire attributes (i.e., intensity, severity, patchiness, spatial scale, or phenology), even though these also likely impact conservation goals.

In the wild, many trees depend on fire as a successful way to clear out the competition and release their seeds. In particular, the giant sequoia depends on fire to reproduce: the cones of the tree open after a fire releases their seeds, the fire having cleared all competing vegetation. Due to fire suppression efforts during the early and mid 20th century Due to fire suppression efforts in the US, low-intensity fires no longer occurred naturally in many groves, and still do not occur in some groves today. The suppression of fires also led to ground fuel build-up and the dense growth which posed the risk of catastrophic wildfires. In the 1970s, the United States National Park Service began systematic fires for the purpose of new seed growth. Eucalyptus regnans or mountain ash of Australia also depends on fire but in a different fashion. They carry their seeds in capsules which can deposit at any time of the year. Being flammable, during a fire the capsules drop nearly all of their seeds and the fire consumes the eucalypt eucalyptus adults, but most of the seeds survive using the ash as a source of nutrients; at their rate of growth, they quickly dominate the land and a new eucalyptus forest grows.

*add a list of several nations that use controlled burns today

The province of Ontario, Canada implements safety procedures and regulations to manage and control wild land fires. They follow these procedures strictly to protect the safety of locals and ensure that the fire does not spread into other areas on land, thus protecting the biodiversity of the forests' ecosystem.

Back Burning:

Back burning is the term given to the process of lighting vegetation in such a way that it has to burn against the prevailing wind. This produces a slower moving and more controllable fire. However this term is also colloquially used to mean all of controlled burning as well.

This process is commonly used for hazard reduction burns and the preparation of fire breaks to enable controlled or hazard reduction burns. Back burning involves starting small fires along a man-made or natural firebreak in front of a main fire front. Back burning reduces the amount of fuel that is available to the main fire by the time that it reaches the burnt area.

Back burning is utilized in controlled burning and during wildfire events. While controlled burns utilize back burning during planned fire events to create a "black line", back burning or backfiring is also done to stop a wildfire that is already in progress. Firebreaks are also often used as an anchor point to start a line of fires along natural or man-made features such as a river, road or a bulldozed clearing. It is called back burning because the small fires are designed to "burn back" towards the main fire front and are usually burning and traveling against ground level winds.

The expression fight fire with fire is derived from the concept of back burning.

Minimum of 5 peer-reviewed papers/sources (full citations) with 2 bullet points of explanation/annotation for each:
 * 1) Agee, James K.; Skinner, Carl N. (2005-06-06). "Basic principles of forest fuel reduction treatments". Forest Ecology and Management. Relative Risk Assessments for Decision –Making Related To Uncharacteristic Wildfire. 211 (1): 83–96. doi:10.1016/j.foreco.2005.01.034. ISSN 0378-1127. Provides research on using controlled burns to create more fire resistant forests. principle of fire resistance are defined and backed with evidence. i could use this to replace a bad source or to modify a section where fire resistance is mentioned. This article talks about the increasing importance of maintaining fire resistant species due to climate change causing more droughts and fires. This could be good evidence to talk about that.
 * 2) Engber, Eamon A.; Varner, J. Morgan; Arguello, Leonel A.; Sugihara, Neil G. (2011-08). "The Effects of Conifer Encroachment and Overstory Structure on Fuels and Fire in an Oak Woodland Landscape". Fire Ecology. 7 (2): 32–50. doi:10.4996/fireecology.0702032. ISSN 1933-9747. This provides additional research on fire tolerant vs fire intolerant woodland species. I want to use this to replace a bad/ dead link and cleanup the portion around this topic a bit.
 * 3) North, Malcolm; Stine, Pete; Zielinski, William; O’Hara, Kevin; Stephens, Scott (2010). "Harnessing fire for wildlife". Wildlife Professional, Spring 2010. Vol 4(1): 30-33. 4 (1): 30–33. This article is very important because it looks at fire in forest management from a wildlife conservation lense. It talks about how fire treatments can be specifically used to create heterogenic forests that support the health of heabitats for endangered wildlife as opposed to leaving a forest entirely alone until it is completely destroyed by a wildfire. I could use this in my possible benefits section.
 * 4) Ryan, Kevin C; Knapp, Eric E; Varner, J Morgan (2013-08). "Prescribed fire in North American forests and woodlands: history, current practice, and challenges". Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. 11 (s1). doi:10.1890/120329. ISSN 1540-9295.This article is a review of literature and research about controlled burns goin back as far as pre colonization. I could use parts of this in the political interests section or the historical section. It provides a good understanding of the forest management practice and how public opinion and trust needs to be appreciated.
 * 5) Yonk, Ryan M.; Mosley, Jeffrey C.; Husby, Peter O. (2018-12-01). "Human Influences on the Northern Yellowstone Range". Rangelands. An Ecological Assessment of the Northern Yellowstone Range. 40 (6): 177–188. doi:10.1016/j.rala.2018.10.004. ISSN 0190-0528.This article discussed how the yellowstone range was shaped by Native American Land management practices including controlled burns. The article discussed how those processes must now be mimicked in order to maintain the health of the landscape. I want to use this to better define the historical and pre historic influence on this practice.

History section
Fire suppression has changed the composition and ecology of North American habitats, including highly fire-dependent ecosystems such as oak savannas and canebrakes, which are now critically endangered habitats on the brink of extinction. In the Eastern United States, fire-sensitive trees such as the red maple are increasing in number, at the expense of fire-tolerant ones like oaks.