This is a very directed study- the advocacy of using prescribed fire in fire-prone landscapes. It is not a comprehensive review of the history of prescribed fire, of the present use of prescribed fire, or the justification for using prescribed fire. It is a study indicating that a segment of the wildlife community can be closely associated with a particular forest understory structure which is also an area important to forest soil pedogenesis, and that moderate to severe fire may be harmful to both that identified wildlife community and forest soil fertility. I assume that fires of high intensity are more likely to occur in semi-arid landscapes than in more mesic areas and I emphasize, as examples, that some New Mexico (NM), U.S.A., landscapes seem to possess conditions favorable to the production of severe fires. I discuss the merits of using prescribed fire in such landscapes. I consider leaf and woody litter on forest floors, wildlife dependencies on the forest litter layer, litter decomposition, soil-plant nutrient cycling, climate and weather, soil series, fire behavior summaries, prescribed fire effects on soil properties, soil temperature effects on vegetation, and the history of New Mexico wildfires in my assessment.
Background
The great forest resource is its soil and associated mineral nutrient pool. The presence and availability of that nutrient source is an important determinate of soil fertility, tree growth potential, and wildlife species welfare. A good management plan recognizes plant and animal organisms as nutrient borrowers and the detritivore and saprophyte community in forest litter and the soil surface as nutrient providers. Disrupting the mineral-nutrient cycle is often disadvantageous, and wildfire and prescribed fire, especially a severe surface burn in fire-prone environments, can be destructive.
Many studies, for example, Kerns and Day (2018), have described and/or reviewed studies of the impacts offire regimes on the structure of plant communities. The intent of the present note is to emphasize the importance and vulnerability of a particular structure within the forest plant community. Leaf and woody litter in the understory is perceived of great importance by many in the soil science community, as an important ecological niche by some in the wildlife management community, and as a biohazard by some in the forest management community. I submit that components within the litter zone are important to forest health, and a dependent wildlife community, and comprise a structure that should be managed as a forest asset. This note cites evidences from an extensive data base linking vertebrate wildlife species to forest litter, then describes the importance of forest litter, and ultimately the impact of fire on forest litter and forest health, especially in semi-arid, fire-prone landscapes. This study is a generalization because the wildlife-vegetation association model cited herein was developed for the humid northeastern United States, and my fire examples are for semi-arid landscapes, with an emphasis on New Mexico in the southwestern United States. The data sets can be co-joined only because the habitat structure that I emphasize is leaf and woody litter which is common to forest surface layers in many regions, and the vertebrate wildlife species I emphasize are representative of those groups that use that litter zone as reproductive habitat or food sourcing areas. I emphasize prescribed fire in my discussion of the impact of fire on that forest litter zone.
The association of wildlife species with the forest litter zone
Wildlife species can be associated with specific habitat attributes like vegetation structure, topography, soil, and water regimes using basic natural history information as described in Ecosearch (Short, Hestbeck and Tiner 1996; Short, Hestbeck and DeGraaf 2001). That study is New England specific, but the modeling and logic are applicable elsewhere. Vegetative structure in the model includes tree life form and age, condition of the tree bole, mid-story layer components, and descriptors of the understory, including the source of leaf and woody litter. Species with similar broad habitat structure dependencies can be grouped together using Ecosearch procedures to form Species Habitat Groups (SHG), a listing of species that may be expected to be similarly affected by, for example, a forest fire. Such a SHG of New England fauna, with reproductive and foraging activity dependencies confined to the leaf and woody litter zone in upland and wetland forest understory layers, comprises a varied group that includes the Northern brown snake (Storeria dekayi), Northern red-belly snake (Storeria occipitomaculata), Northern ringneck snake (Diadophis punctatus), Northern black racer (Coluber constrictor), Eastern smooth green snake (Opheodrys vernalis), Eastern milk snake (Lampropeltis triangulum), American woodcock (Scolopax minor), Hermit thrush (Catharus guttatus), Worm-eating warbler (Helmitheros vermivorus), Lincoln's sparrow (Melospiza lincolnii), White-throated sparrow (Zonotrichia albicollis), Dark-eyed junco (Junco hyemalis), Masked shrew (Sorex cinereus), Smoky shrew (Sorex fumeus), Long-tailed shrew (Sorex dispar), Pygmy shrew (Sorex hoyi), Northern short-tailed shrew (Blarina brevicauda), Snowshoe hare (Lepus americanus), White-footed mouse (Peromyscus leucopus), Southern red-backed vole (Clethrionomys gapperi), Northern Redback salamander (Plethodon cinereus), Northern Slimy salamander (Plethodon glutinosus), and the Winter wren (Troglodytes troglodytes). How the individual species within that large and varied group partition the litter resources on the forest floors of New England is a different story and is not told here. Individuals from that SHG, however, would presumably respond similarly to the challenges presented by a moderate or severe surface fire. If the animals are not highly mobile, they are likely to be killed by the severe fire. Any surviving individuals will presumably have their habitat significantly modified by the fire. Other SHG, not solely dependent upon the litter zone, but that use the litter zone in conjunction with habitat structures in environments other than just the wetland or upland understory layers, will also be affected by a fire. A fire that burns wood and leaf litter fallen onto New England understory habitats from over-story trees and mid-story trees and shrubs is predicted by Ecosearch species-habitat models to potentially impact 44 of the 60 species of mammals, 17 of the 49 species of amphibians and reptiles, and 77 of the 221 bird species, that comprise the 330 non-fish, inland, vertebrate wildlife species of New England. These data suggest that over 40% of the wildlife community in New England has a dependency on the forest litter zone and the forest understory. Presumably, a similar wildlife-forest structure dependency also occurs in other regional habitats throughout North America.
The importance of forest litter
Song et al. (2023) describe forest litter, including fallen leaves, twigs, seeds, and other woody debris, as the link between forest vegetation and underlying soil systems. Leaf litter decomposes rapidly with nutrient elements from plants returned to the soil, where they provide a source of nutrients for plant root uptake and vegetation growth. The review by those authors suggests that forest litter is important for nutrient cycling and energy flow in forest ecosystems, plays a key role in improving nutrient availability to plants, enhances soil fertility and plant growth and development, accelerates soil organic matter formation, and increases net carbon storage in forested lands.
Forest litter is an environment, a chemical laboratory, and a habitat populated by a large array of macro-invertebrates, micro-invertebrates, fungi, and bacteria that actively reduce litter to mineral components. Earthworms (Annelida), millipedes (Diplopoda), springtails (Collembola), woodlice (Oniscidea), ants (Formicidae), and other organisms are important detritivores that feed on and within the forest litter. These soil builders are sought as food by some ground-feeding vertebrates; for example, in the Ecosearch model (above), the presence of earthworms would be a critical determinate in predicting the suitability of an habitat area for woodcock.
The presence of forest litter is often under-valued in forest management. Although sometimes considered primarily as a fuel source for wildfires, moist decaying leaf litter and rotting wood on forest understory surfaces do not burn well. In addition, forest litter is important, for example, in maintaining soil carbon levels, and decreases in litter input can lower soil carbon content (Bowden et al. 2014). The familiar soil mineral cycle describes how vegetation utilizes minerals from the soil and later returns those minerals, after litter decomposition, to the soil, with the aid of saprophytes, detritivores, fungi, and bacteria. The soil surface in forest ecosystems can be considered either a reservoir or a drain for minerals essential to plants. It is a reservoir when forest debris is allowed to decompose so minerals can recycle and become available to aid new plant growth, and a drain if the mineral load is removed from the forest ecosystem by tree harvest techniques that remove all the tree biomass or by severe fire events.
A number of different things can happen with tree harvest. Forest activities remove a mineral load when a tree is harvested and mineral and nutrient pools over a large forested area can be reduced for a century or more following clear-cutting (Richardson et al. 2017). Total tree harvest of a single tree (TTH) removes the stem and its carbon and other minerals from the forest community, but also the carbon and other minerals from within the canopy, slash and bark if those tissues are collected and used, for example, as biofuels (Vohs et al. 2023). Stem-only harvest (SOH) removes the bole, its carbon and other minerals from the forest community for wood production purposes, but the canopy remnants, slash, and bark can be retained on the forest floor, mechanically reduced in size to conform to ground surface features where those materials are wetted by rain, allowed to decompose, and serve a variety of purposes. Those purposes include: the feeding of detritivores and saprophytes in the organic layer, which aids in the mineral recycling process and eventually is useful in the development of new plant tissues; the produced macro-invertebrates among the detritivores and saprophytes are food sources for a variety of vertebrates and thus are basic to some vertebrate food chains; the decomposing canopy remnants, slash, and bark provide cover and reproductive habitat for some wildlife species; and increases to mineral pools may enhance the capability of the forest to produce future generations of timber. Soil nutrients lost in the total removal of logging residue, by fire or otherwise, may not be recoverable during conventional growth rotation periods (Vos et al., 2023). It is advantageous to retain decomposing litter so that a mineral pool is developed and available. Thus, some portion of the carbon and other minerals from a SOH tree can become incorporated into the soil and into animal tissues, contribute to animal well-being, and enhance future timber production. Collecting the canopy remnants, slash, and bark into burn piles, and their burning, may remove the stored carbon and other minerals from the vegetation community. If the fire is of sufficient intensity, it will volatilize carbon and other minerals, for example, nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorus (DeBano 1991), from the soil organic layer near the burn pile and reduce the burn area's soil fertility. High severity forest fires may diminish the total nutrient pool on a site through some combination of volatilization, oxidation, ash transport, leaching and erosion (Agbeshie et al. 2022).
A conundrum is that forest resources are viewed differently by different persons. For example, one view is that a forest is an ecological resource that features trees and a valuable understory. A second view is that a forest is a tree-land filled with economically important wood and understory vegetation that can be a fire hazard. A shared concern is that a forest resource, along with human habitations and lives, can be destroyed by fire. A complication is that some forests that occur in very wildfire prone areas have forest conditions, including substantial ground vegetation and logging residue or slash piled haphazardly on the forest floor, dog-hair growth of small trees extending into the mid-story, and fire ladders into the mid-story and over-story layers, that provide serious conditions for producing problem fires.
Wildfire and Prescription fires
Wildfires are unintentional burns, whereas prescribed fires are deliberate events serving a variety of goals. Prescribed fire is the use of intentionally managed light severity fire to reduce fuel loads in the forest understory, regenerate some forest species, control some forest diseases and pests, and perhaps to enhance some forest soil properties (Agbeshie et al., 2022). But not all prescribed fires are of low intensity and prescribed burns that become uncontrolled can morph into major wildfires. The acceptance of prescription fire as a forest fuel management tool has grown from its inception in the southeastern United States and has become an accepted tool throughout North America. Many factors combine to produce different fire behavior conditions across North America. The paradox is that a technology developed for use in one type of habitat, the humid "Southeastern Mixed Forest Province" (Bailey 1995), has been assumed an appropriate tool in totally different habitats, for example, the drier "Southern Rocky Mountain Steppe-Open Woodland-Coniferous Forest-Alpine Meadow Province" (Bailey 1995) in, for example, New Mexico.
Forest fuel conditions vary greatly in the two provinces and fire behavior should also be expected to vary. Both climate and tree life form are major variables. Mature pinon pine (Pinus sp.) and juniper (Juniperus sp.) trees in the southwestern United States may have branches dipping into the understory, providing far different fire vulnerabilities than those presented by tall boles of, for example, yellow pine in the southeastern United States or ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) in the southwest region.
Climate is a significant variable. The climate in a semi-arid region, for example, Santa Fe, NM, is cooler, drier, less humid, and windier (Table 1) than the climate in Tallahassee, FL, near where Tall Timbers Research Institute for fire ecology research is located, and the science of prescribed fire was founded. The Santa Fe conditions are for the city at 7000 ft (2135 m) and extensive portions of the nearby forest are at 9000 (2740 m) - 12000 ft (3660 m) and may experience even more fire-prone conditions than those listed in Table 1. The relative humidity in Tallahassee averages greater than 70% throughout the year, and except for the cool months of November-February, the relative humidity in Santa Fe city averages < 50 % (Table 1). Precipitation exceeds evaporation in much of the Southeast and soils, soil surfaces, and litter near those surfaces are moist and many prescribed fires in that region can be characterized as cool and of light severity. In the New Mexico example, pan evaporation far exceeds measured precipitation and soils, soil surfaces, and litter near soil surfaces are often dry and many fires likely burn at moderate to severe severity further drying soils and reducing soil mineral resources. It is much easier to produce a light severity fire in the southeast than in semi-arid New Mexico-like landscapes. A prescribed fire in the moist and humid southeast might be described as of light severity, cool and slow moving, while a fire set under similar fuel load conditions in a semi-arid, windy habitat in the southwest may become a roaring inferno, making for difficult control. The benefits of light severity fires are lost under such conditions. The observable differences between the impacts of
Table 1. Comparison of monthly average weather measurements at Tallahassee (Tal), Fl, and Santa Fe (SF), NM
Rainfall (inches) Humidity (%) Wind (mph) Temperature (F)
|
|
Tal
|
SF
|
Tal
|
SF
|
Tal
|
SF
|
Tal
|
SF
|
Jan
|
1.97
|
0.63
|
74
|
67
|
5.1
|
8.2
|
43.3
|
30.5
|
Feb
|
2.05
|
0.63
|
77
|
60
|
5.1
|
8.7
|
47.5
|
34.5
|
Mar
|
2.24
|
0.79
|
74
|
45
|
5.1
|
9.3
|
52.2
|
41.5
|
Apr
|
3.11
|
0.55
|
74
|
36
|
4.8
|
9.7
|
59.1
|
48.1
|
May
|
2.68
|
0.63
|
72
|
34
|
4.2
|
9.1
|
65.5
|
57.5
|
Jun
|
4.96
|
0.75
|
76
|
32
|
3.8
|
7.9
|
72.1
|
67.1
|
Jul
|
5.2
|
1.73
|
77
|
45
|
3.6
|
6.1
|
73.9
|
70.5
|
Aug
|
5.55
|
1.02
|
77
|
45
|
3.6
|
5.7
|
74.7
|
68.5
|
Sep
|
3.62
|
0.91
|
77
|
48
|
4.1
|
6.8
|
70.7
|
62.5
|
Oct
|
2.28
|
0.83
|
73
|
47
|
4.5
|
7.5
|
61.1
|
50.5
|
Nov
|
1.26
|
0.59
|
74
|
51
|
4.8
|
8.1
|
51.1
|
38.5
|
Dec
|
2.76
|
0.75
|
78
|
64
|
4.8
|
8.1
|
47.8
|
30.5
|
fires of light severity and those called of moderate severity have been described (Keeley 2009). Light severity fires do not impact the canopy, although tree boles may be scorched, and surface litter,
mosses and herbs either charred or consumed, but the soil organic layer is largely intact with charring limited to a few mm of depth. Burns of moderate or severe severities have some canopy cover killed, all understory plants charred or consumed, much woody material on the soil surface consumed or charred, and the pre-fire soil organic layer largely consumed. As soil temperatures progressively rise during a moderate or severe fire, water evaporates from the soil, then in progression- fine roots within the soil are killed, fungi are killed, bacteria are killed, seeds within the soil die, chemical properties within the soil are altered, and the very structure of the soil may be modified (Agbeshie et al., 2022).
Introducing fire into a fire-prone landscape involves risk, it is like tickling the dragon's tail. Planning a prescribed fire anticipates likely fire behavior, and fire behavior models (NWCG 2021) are complex. Such models consider environmental conditions like relative humidity, surface wind strength and direction, air stability and storm probability, slope of terrain and degree of drought which affects the amount of available fuel. The condition of that fuel is also of special concern. Types of understory vegetation, whether live or dead and its moisture content, depth of litter or other fuel components, the compactness of the litter and its flammability, the sizes and identity of the litter, the compactness and moisture content of the forest canopy, the canopy cover class, the vertical distances between understory and mid-story surfaces and the base of the tree over-story canopy, and the predicted fire intensity and flame length of the planned burn are important considerations. Presumably, a prescribed fire is intended to have low to moderate spread rates and flame lengths that keep fire confined to the understory layer, and away from over-story canopies and probable crown fires. That achievement may require extensive tree thinning and litter preparation and compacting. The paradox is that the extensive preparation for a controllable fire in fire-prone landscapes may be sufficient to reduce the need for the prescribed burn.
Some semi-arid landscapes seem fire-prone. For example, the year 2022 was an historical fire year in New Mexico, with at least 21 named fires that each burned over 400 ha (1000 acres) (New Mexico wildfires 2022); in total, about 366,000 ha burned. Two of the fires, the Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak fire at 138,188 ha and the Black Fire at 131,680 ha, are the largest wild fires in recent New Mexico history and caused significant destruction to ecological and residential communities. Fire cause is under investigation and still undetermined for many of the 21 New Mexico blazes of 2022, although five of the fires have been traced to human causes, one to tree-power line contact, one to a lighting strike, and four to escaped intentional burns, including the Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak fire which itself resulted from the joining of a prescribed burn and a burn pile ( 2 events). The Cerro Pelado fire flaring from a presumably dormant burn pile burned about 1850 ha, and the small Overflow fire was caused by an escaped prescribed burn. The Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak fire destroyed over 900 structures, severely impacted a northern New Mexico rural culture, severely damaged soils on both private and public lands, negatively impacted watersheds, and destroyed wildlife and their habitats. At least 3.95 billions of dollars have been requested to fund the control costs of that fire, to remediate its impacts, and to compensate New Mexicans and Tribal Nations who were significantly negatively impacted by the fire. Prior to the 2022 Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak fire, the most destructive wildfire in New Mexico history was the Cerro Grande fire, which was also an escaped prescribed burn. The Cerro Grande fire of May-July 2000 destroyed 280 homes and 70 other structures and threatened the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The Federal Government Accounting Office estimated that fire control costs and reimbursements for that fire totaled one billion dollars.
Many vegetated, semi-arid landscapes are fire- prone. Such landscapes in New Mexico can be characterized as high desert areas interspersed with mountainous landscapes that receive significant winter snow moisture, drying warm seasonal winds, sometimes of gale force, and frequent spring-summer lightning events with or without accompanying rainfall. There is a short fuel cycle in many terrains where one year's summer monsoon rains may be sufficient to produce herbaceous vegetation that becomes the following year's warm season fire hazard. Johnson (2022) compiled a list of fire events in New Mexico from the years 2000 to 2022. A recognized fire event on his list either had to be greater than 40 sq km (about 10,000 acres) in area or be of significance because the fire resulted in the loss of personal property or human life. He listed 118 such fires in the 23 year period. Forty- eight were lighting caused: 33 of those began during May and up to mid-June when soils are driest (Santa Fe Series 2008), prior to the usual summer rainy monsoon season. Those 33 fires may have been caused by dry electric storms whose moisture content evaporated before touching the ground. Forty- three of the 118 fires were human caused; 7 involved power lines; four were the significant prescribed burn or burn pile events described above ((Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak (2 events), Cerro Pelado, and Cerro Grande)); and the remaining fires have unknown or undetermined origins. The location where lightning will strike or human carelessness causes a fire disaster cannot be predicted, making an active fire suppression policy desirable.
Decades of forest fire suppression are sometimes blamed for allowing understory fuels to accumulate and an unhealthy level of forest under-growth to occur. It has been argued that periodic wildfire would have cleaned out heavy fuel loads and allowed an open mature forest to develop. But fire suppression has merit because it reduces loss of human lives and property, and areas of lessened soil fertility because fires producing moderate or severe surface burns in fire-prone areas diminish soil mineral pools. Fire scars on old logs may indicate the frequency of past fires and, perhaps, something about the intensity of those fires. Deep burning or crown fires (Keeley 2009), however, kill trees, so old trees with several fire scars presumably endured several light to moderate fires that did not crown because of limited understory fuels, high moisture content of those fuels when fire occurred, or intense rainfall accompanying the igniting lightning strikes.
Prescribed fire has been strongly advocated as an advantageous tool for necessary forest management. There are many descriptive pictures of benign, creeping, and controlled fires in the literature, but their fire conditions are not analogous to those where fuels are dry, humidity is low, moisture evaporation from the soil exceeds precipitation so soils are dry, and where winds are common and frequently variable. There are records of prescribed burns that became uncontrollable disasters (above), as well as evidences of site impacts that are ecologically undesirable (Figure 1). The impact of prescribed fire seems proportional to the severity of the fire, which in turn is dependent on forest conditions.
Pickens (2000), in a review of the use of prescribed fire in the southern United States, noted that low intensity prescribed fire consumes about 30-50% of the litter layer but that nutrient resources, although initially reduced because of litter loss, frequently become more available because low intensity burning enhances litter decomposition rates. He considers that the ultimate goal of a southern forest prescribed burn is to enhance the success of tree seedling establishment by the use of low intensity surface burns. The paradox is that a controlled procedure developed to use low intensity fire in a moist landscape to reduce some understory competition to favor tree seedling establishment and survival, has morphed into management efforts to eliminate the understory layer in fire-prone, drier landscapes where environmental conditions favor the risk of high temperature prescribed burns that may decrease the total mineral nutrient pool on a site through some combination of oxidation, volatilization, ash transport, leaching, and erosion (DeBano 1991). A fire hot enough to kill trees and shrubs in the understory and trees in the mid-story may diminish mineral pools of phosphorus, potassium, manganese, magnesium, and calcium; destroy soil organic layers; diminish soil invertebrate activity; and possibly alter soil structure, texture, porosity, wet-ability, infiltration rates, and water holding capacity (Agbeshie 2022). Those loses are all challenges to ecological engineering efforts (Auclerc et al. 2022) that strive to restore and enhance soil microbial function in impacted or deteriorated forest habitats.
The forest is a complex organism whose health is benefitted by the quality of the inorganic soil-organic understory surface interface. Prescribed fire of light severity in a moisture rich environment does no apparent harm to that interface environment, while a severe and hot prescribed fire in a fire-prone environment may destroy that interface. I call the results of a moderate or severe surface burn (Keeley 2009) in a fire-prone landscape where the tree bole and tree canopy may be retained, but the understory layer has been lost, "the canopied desert", because little or no habitat for vertebrate species remains in the understory. Figure 1 is of an area near the Black Canyon Campground within the Santa Fe National Forest, New Mexico, that was previously burned. It has the appearance of being the product of a moderate or severe surface burn (Keeley 2009) because understory plants and small woody debris on the surface have been consumed. It is possible that larger debris had been hauled away to burn piles. Consider the Ecosearch example again and the implication that the leaf and woody debris zone and the understory layer are critical habitats for some members of the wildlife community and soil science studies that emphasize the importance of the understory litter to pedogenesis and soil fertility. Those important products, wildlife habitat and soil fertility, are presumably both lost when forest conditions resemble those in the Figure 1 image, which resembles a firebreak or fire containment zone, and is not emblematic of a forest that is intended to provide timber, habitat for wildlife, healthy watersheds, and recreational amenities. There is even the hint of a small channel in the Figure 1 photograph where water movement might have transported ash bearing minerals from the burn site.
Forest management is daunting because of the forces of regeneration and plant succession and the vastness of areas requiring management. Still, a good goal of forest management would seem to be to preserve and enhance soil fertility, wildlife habitat, and the likelihood that future timber production can occur on as large an area as possible. Perhaps forest management should really begin at the inorganic soil-organic surface interface where forest-nutrient cycles are initiated, where nutrients from decomposition products begin their journey to the rhizosphere and tree roots and then eventually to the tree bole and canopy. The health of that litter zone seems an asset and a worthy management goal. Consider the decomposing litter on the forest floor as the raw material, the nutrient pools in the soil as the resource to be maintained, and the tree as the renewable product. The use of prescribed fire as a forest management tool in fire-prone landscapes is intended to promote the renewable product, but moderate to severe surface fires are destructive to the raw material base. Destroying the litter zone and understory represents a significant counter-intuitive management choice if the intent of management is to maintain a healthy forest because nutrient cycles are disrupted and nutrient loads are lost, possibly for many decades, because of moderate or severe surface fires.
A management strategy that emphasizes the thinning of tree stands to reduce canopy cover, the disposal of slash in burn piles, and the use of prescribed fire to eliminate much of the understory layer reduces the risk of future forest fires, but has disadvantages of drying the soil, reducing the mineral pools and fertility of forest soils, and the destruction of wildlife habitat. A more advantageous strategy would emphasize tree thinning, but would also emphasize the retention of chopped or masticated small trees and unwanted understory and mid-story vegetation, to produce a condition where leaf, woody litter, and small chunks of wood accumulate and are retained on the forest surface and are allowed to decompose. Fire requires oxygen and a good strategy for managing understory fuels is to minimize the litter-surface area exposed to oxygen by minimizing the size of the physical envelope of litter components, and distributing those comminuted or diminished materials across the forest floor, rather than placing those materials into burn piles. The intent would be the physical management of fuels to keep fire spread rates and flame lengths from any surface fire low, and away from the base of the over-story canopy. Decomposing, rotting, and moist plant tissues do not readily burn, but they do eventually return nutrients to the soil, enhance soil structure, and assist in the provision of wildlife habitat and vertebrate food chains and webs. A rotting, bark covered log on the forest floor is a potential mineral resource, but also a habitat resource to a wildlife species like bear (Ursus sp.) that tears that log apart while foraging, an action that enhances the future decomposition of the log. The challenge to forest management is to ensure that forest soil fertility is maintained in the long term, even after tree thinning or harvest which can remove nutrients from the ecosystem (Ovington 1958). The intent of management becomes an effort to manage the forest understory to maintain or enhance soil-tree nutrient cycles. If fire intensity can not be controlled, then perhaps the role of prescribed fire in semi-arid landscapes should be to produce fire breaks and containment lines to protect the ecologically managed forest and areas of special interest. Such management is expensive, but a great deal of management can occur for the same billion of dollars required for the suppression and remediation of a large and severe fire that had prescribed fire origins.