Announcing the new TWS Technical Review on Prescribed Fire

Technical Reviews are scientific analyses related to prominent topics and issues in wildlife science, management, conservation and policy that are written by panels of experts and are often used in preparing TWS Position Statements. The new Technical Review, “Effects of Prescribed Fire on Wildlife and Wildlife Habitat in Selected Ecosystems of North America,” is now available on the TWS website. Anyone may download and print a copy at no cost.

The review describes how prescribed fire is widely applied as a management tool in North America to meet various objectives such as reducing fuel loads and fuel continuity, returning fire to an ecosystem, enhancing wildlife habitats, improving forage, preparing seedbeds, improving watershed conditions, enhancing nutrient cycling, controlling exotic weeds, and enhancing resilience from climate change. The authors use a regional approach, focusing on selected vegetation types, including southeastern pine and mixed pine-oak forests, eastern coastal marshes, midwestern jack pine forests, sagebrush ecosystems of the interior West, mixed-severity forests of the northern Rocky Mountains, subalpine and montane forests of the Canadian Rockies, southwestern ponderosa pine forests, desert grasslands, and shortgrass steppe ecosystems.