With more rain and fewer fires, California forests saw more prescribed burns this year

It’s been a good year for forest managers in California. Fewer massive wildfires and more precipitation have improved conditions for prescribed burning. 

At Lake Tahoe, enhanced fire restrictions began in the beginning of August — which area officials say is almost a month later than usual. 

“This year has been sort of on the ideal side,” said Carrie Thaler, fire chief for the Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit. “It's given us some momentum.”

This technique, which involves the intentional and controlled burning of fuels on the forest floor, is a necessary tool in reducing fire risks in California. Last year, state officials committed to expanding these efforts with plans to burn up to 400,000 acres annually by 2025. 

Jecobie Waters, the assistant forest fire management officer at the Eldorado National Forest, said fire teams typically burn from the beginning of the year into June. After that, they have a second burn window starting sometime in the fall. 

But this schedule is the ideal, not the norm. Burning depends on weather conditions and available resources. During intense drought and big fire years, forest management teams have limited opportunities to carry out this work. 

These conditions also impact the type of burning. Waters said there are two primary types: One method, pile burning, involves gathering woody forest debris into a pile and burning it together. The other method, understory burning, is what Waters describes as a large-scale burning of the landscape itself. He said this second method is closer to how fire would naturally come into a forest and is preferred. 

“If we're treating [the forest] regularly with understory burning, then if a fire comes through there, it's not going to have any material to burn,” Waters said. “It's just going to be a lot more benefit to the forest.” 

Thaler said the people who conduct prescribed burns are often the same people who fight massive wildfires, which is another limitation. 

“They didn't have enough resources to take care of the fires,” said Thaler, describing previous big fire years. “So there is no way that we would have extra resources to think about prescribed burning.” 

But this year was different. Waters said resources and weather conditions haven’t allowed teams in his area to conduct an understory burn for the last couple of years. But this year, in early October, he said teams were able to begin understory burning in the Eldorado National Forest. He said they’ll continue as long as weather conditions allow and aim to burn more than 3,500 acres by next June.

Lisa Herron, a U.S. Forest Service spokesperson with the Lake Tahoe Basin, said teams similarly had more opportunities to burn this year. They were able to conduct burns from January to June 25 ,and resumed burning on Sept. 19. In an ideal year, she said, teams aim to burn between 800 to 1,000 acres; by the end of this year, they plan to burn 800 acres. 

Although fire teams have made positive progress in 2023, Thaler said they’re making up for years where this work was not as possible. 

“I think that it will be a very slow path to get us to maintenance,” she said. “We have years of catching up to do.”