Ecological effects of prescribed fire season: a literature review and synthesis for managers
Abstract
Prescribed burning may be conducted at times of the year when fires were infrequent historically, leading to concerns about potential adverse effects on vegetation and wildlife. Historical and prescribed fire regimes for different regions in the continental United States were compared and literature on season of prescribed burning synthesized. In regions and vegetation types where considerable differences in fuel consumption exist among burning seasons, the effects of prescribed fire season appears, for many ecological variables, to be driven more by fire-intensity differences among seasons than by phenology or growth stage of organisms at the time of fire. Where fuel consumption differs little among burning seasons, the effect of phenology or growth stage of organisms is often more apparent, presumably because it is not overwhelmed by fire-intensity differences. Most species in ecosystems that evolved with fire appear to be resilient to one or few out-of-season prescribed burn(s). However, a variable fire regime including prescribed burns at different times of the year may alleviate the potential for undesired changes and maximize biodiversity.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Burning in the spring results in the fewest significant changes to stand and fuel structures, and spring burning results in greater retention of large woody debris, which could be desirable in some cases, including the retention of microhabitat features required by many wildlife species.
“Burning in the spring results in the fewest significant changes to stand and fuel structures, and spring burning results in greater retention of large woody debris, which could be desirable in some cases, including the retention of microhabitat features required by many wildlife species (Knapp et al. 2009, Fettig et al. 2010).”
From The Effects of Forest Fuel-Reduction Treatments in the United States (2012) · cites this paper as Knapp et al. 2009
The citation lists haven’t been fetched yet
References 255 · Cited by 286
- Authors
- Knapp, E. E., Estes, B. L., & Skinner, C. N.
- Affiliations
- US Forest Service (US)
- Published
- 2009
- OpenAlex
- W2171136725
- Cited by
- 286
- References
- 255
- Citations by year
- 2026: 20 · 2025: 24 · 2024: 16 · 2023: 20 · 2022: 29 · 2021: 30 · 2020: 18 · 2019: 17 · 2018: 23 · 2017: 16 · 2016: 14 · 2015: 16 · 2014: 17 · 2013: 7 · 2012: 10
- Type
- report
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Lincoln (University of Nebraska) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Global and Planetary Change › Fire effects on ecosystems
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Ecology › Rangeland and Wildlife Management
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Global and Planetary Change › Forest Management and Policy
- Keywords
- prescribed burning, fire season, fire regimes, fire intensity, fuel consumption, vegetation response to fire, phenology, fire-adapted species, biodiversity, fire management
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
