Conducting Prescribed Fires

The term "backfire" refers to a commonly used method for prescribed burning in which the igniter sets a line of fire that slowly backs into the wind. This article explains how to effectively deploy backfires in prescribed burns.

Guide covers legal obligations, equipment, personnel requirements, ignition techniques, and other elements of successful prescribed burns on grassland.

Detailed guide to the ins and outs of conducting and managing a prescribed burn.

Article about how fires of different intensities (temperatures) have different effects on landscapes.

Template to plan a prescribed fire and ensure that it meets legal requirements and achieves its desired purpose.

Short fact sheet describing different wildfire flame types and the implications for controlled burns and wildfire management.

Moisture is the overriding factor governing fuel flammability. It determines whether ignition will take place and to what depth the forest floor will be consumed. This article outlines key factors and considerations regarding fuel moisture and prescribed burning.

Short guide offering tips for effective prescribed burns, including timing, equipment, and weather conditions. The guide focuses specifically on using prescribed burns for grassland management, but some of the information applies to prescribed burns in forests and other landscapes.

Outlines the benefits of prescribed fire and key considerations for conducting a prescribed burn.

The prescribed burner has numerous tools at their disposal to start fire. Ground ignition devices continue to be developed and refined and include a wide range of options from kitchen matches to state-of-the-art hand-held launchers. This fact sheet describes many of these devices and includes a table to summarize advantages and disadvantages of various methods.

The purpose of this guide is to provide standards, establish common terminology and definitions, and identify planning and implementation procedures for the use of prescribed fire in Pennsylvania.These standards specify what is minimally acceptable for prescribed fire planning and implementation. Organizations may choose to establish additional standards and policy direction, but they must adhere to, and cannot modify, these minimums.

A prescribed fire is a planned fire—sometimes called a controlled burn—used to manage certain types of landscapes. It reduces the chance of major wildfires and provides numerous other benefits for humans, plants, and wildlife. (Print version of ConservationTools.org guide)

Establishes standards for evaluating the complexity of prescribed burns. The standards: Provide decision support that highlights the risk to values associated with prescribed fire implementation; identify the technical difficulty of managing the risk to values; inform the complexity rating determination of high, moderate, or low for a prescribed fire; identify prescribed fire plan elements that may pose special problems or concerns. The worksheet allows users to plug in information about a prescribed burn and see its expected complexity.

This guide establishes national interagency standards for the planning and implementation of prescribed fire.

Includes information about key factors in sound prescribed burn plans, a sample plan, and a plan template for users to modify.

This in-depth guide contains information on prescribed fire smoke management techniques, air quality regulations, smoke monitoring, modeling, communication, public perception of prescribed fire and smoke, climate change, practical meteorological approaches and smoke tools.

Partnerships among public agencies, private entities, and other individuals are an increasingly common way to facilitate ecosystem conservation, especially in fire-dependent landscapes. For example, partnerships can provide mechanisms through which stakeholders share costs, staff, and other resources to promote fire use. However, the stakeholders involved in such partnerships have different perspectives about how to prioritize sites for burning and the factors that constrain prescribed burning. A mutual understanding of one another’s perspectives would help stakeholders success-fully collaborate to facilitate prescribed burning.