Living With Fire Podcast
Living With Fire Podcast
How did we get here? History of Wildfire in Nevada
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Brad Schultz, professor and Humboldt County Extension educator, discusses the role of fire in Nevada, historically. As an expert in rangeland management, he has looked at wildfire from a “big picture” perspective across the state and across the West.
For more full episode details including the transcript, visit https://www.buzzsprout.com/1819551/episodes/8944203
Welcome. This is the first episode of The Living with Fire Podcast. I'm your host, Megan Kay, the Outreach Coordinator for Living with Fire and I'm joined by my two bosses, Christina Restaino is here and Jamie Roice-Gomes. You guys want to introduce to introduce yourself?
Christina Restaino:Yeah, my name is Christina Restaino. I am the Director of the Living with Fire Program.
Jamie Roice-Gomes:Hi everyone. Jamie Roice-Gomes, Manager of the Living with Fire Program.
Megan Kay:Awesome. So we're here today to talk about our interview we did with Brad Schultz. He's the extension educator out in Humboldt County for University of Nevada, Reno Extension. And he talked with us a while back about the history of fire. In Nevada range lands. You guys have had an opportunity to listen to the podcast, well, I've listened to it a bunch because me and Jordan edit it, so I'm gonna start off with your guys thoughts. Jamie, want to go first?
Jamie Roice-Gomes:Yeah, I thought it was really interesting. I didn't realize that it was a hotly debated question, when people are talking about the fire history on the range here in the Great Basin, I honestly didn't even consider that.
Megan Kay:Yeah, I didn't realize that. I mean, I didn't know anything about the science of history of fire. So it's interesting to hear the sort of, the evidence that they have, and also just a lot of it is speculative because of which you guys will hear about later. What about you Christina?
Christina Restaino:You know, I thought it was really cool how he really talked a lot about how these lands have been managed, you know, perpetually and constantly. And you don't really think about the fact, like, okay, Native Americans were having a lot of fire. They were gathering fuel and burning for cooking, for manufacturing, right? It's like, I think more about okay, staying warm and making food, but not like manufacturing tools and clothing and things like that. And so you know that just perpetual use of fire all the time, and how that really modified the fuel availability on the landscape, and how, with the absence of that. You know, what does that mean for the fuels that we have now? Right? We have, obviously have so many fuels, and this huge fuel issue. But I thought that was really interesting.
Megan Kay:Yeah, it seems to me, and you guys have a science background, so when you guys were learning about ecology, were humans, talked about much?
Christina Restaino:Oh, all the time.
Megan Kay:All the time? Yeah. So it's not exactly, it's not so, I don't know. It just seems, it seems to me, like it's still kind of like being understood, though, the historic impact of humans in the landscape.
Christina Restaino:I think it's often simplified, and I think that that becomes, you know, it's the the same story. Native Americans used a lot of fire. The end. Right? As opposed to like, well, how are they using fire, and what times of year were they using fire, and what were they using, what objectives were they using it for?
Jamie Roice-Gomes:And what were they using to build those fires? Like they were using sagebrush as the main fuel source. I mean, I never considered that. And then I really thought it was interesting when Brad brought up the fact that, I mean, think about how many campfires get loose today. I mean, if there is a perpetual use of wildfire out on the landscape from Native Americans, can you imagine how many wildfires have gotten loose then?
Megan Kay:Seriously. Yeah, when he just laid out the math, my brain was like, wow. And that's just for Northern Paiute Shoshone people, which is like, or just Northern Paiute,
Christina Restaino:Yeah. And then also, you know, the the concept of, okay, then Native Americans were removed from the land for the most part. We brought in grazing, and we started to develop landscapes. And then the fine fuels were removed because of the grazing, and then we didn't have any before. fire, right? So it's like, you have a bunch of fire all the time. You don't have any fire, and now we have so much fire. And so, you know, it's the same story you hear in, you know, in the Sierra Nevada ecosystems as well, right? Right where you have this well, we had fire, and then we didn't have any fire, and now we have a lot of fire. And so, you know, just what are the different ways that we modify fuels as humans over time? And then I love the point at the end of, you know, we can't not manage our ecosystems, for fire, for ecosystem resilience, for climate change, for any of these big, you know, problems and stressors that we have because our ecosystems have
Jamie Roice-Gomes:Yeah, I love how it ended on that. always been managed and manipulated in some way, whether that be for the positive or the negative. And so we can't just step back and leave them alone at this point, because there's too, it's too complex.
Christina Restaino:I did too.
Megan Kay:Yeah, and something that I you know, when you're learning about, like wildlife in the ecosystem, you know, it's you understand that animals have, you know, we're animals too, but they you understand that wildlife have that sort of symbiotic relationship where they are managing their little habitats as well, and that's having an effect on the ecosystem. But humans like it just, you know, I'm learning as well, and my brain is sort of forming to, you know, adapt to this sort of like field of study, and just the idea of, yes, okay, humans in the landscape, it's not just that we're apart and separate. It's not just that we should be hands off and let mother nature do its thing. It's like we are part of it, and we always have been. So yeah, I think that that part really struck a chord with me, for sure.
Christina Restaino:And we live in it and we keep building in
Megan Kay:It's in our best interest to make sure that the it. outcomes of our land management, you know, strategies are mutually beneficial to like all species. So, yeah, it was, I mean, that's my little kumbaya thing, but it's really, it's definitely like, I've started putting the pieces together, you know, because I think there's a lot of slogans, and there's a lot of, like, cliches about nature and stewardship, but then when you actually understand humans roles, just in this context with fire, then you really, it's, I think it's like, it helps, kind of like, bind that all together for me, at least so, and I hope it will for the listeners to understand that humans have always been in these landscapes, and we're a huge part of the resilience, like keeping these things in check. You know.
Brad Schultz:So my name is Brad Schultz, and I'm the extension educator for the University of Nevada Cooperative Extension housed in Humboldt County the city of Winnemucca. I've been in this position for 20 years now, starting my 21st year, and my program focus here is largely range management. I also do some work, work with a noxious weeds and agricultural and pasture settings. Within that context, I do a lot of work with public lands grazing issues. I'm on a quite a few different collaborative planning processes for different grazing allotments. Been involved with the sage-grouse planning issues since it started here in 2001 been working with Barry Perryman quite a bit on fine fuels management, using livestock during season grazing to manage fine fuels, to try to reduce fuel carry over and reduce the size, intensity and probability of large catastrophic wildfires.
Megan Kay:How would you describe range management?
Brad Schultz:So on rangelands, you're doing a type of land, typically arid lands, not always, but more often than not, arid lands. So you're looking at what ecological processes, mechanisms, interactions, affect the distribution and abundance of plants, animals, how they interact with soils, climate, the flow of water, nutrients through the system, and then the management side is, what specific actions do you take to manipulate those resources to achieve specific goals for the benefit of society?
Megan Kay:That's a very good, succinct explanation, and I feel like I understand it better now. So I think I'm excited for our listeners to hear that.
Brad Schultz:And I probably should add people often equate range management with livestock management, and livestock management is just one component of range management. It's not, livestock grazing is just one use of range fence. The two are not this thing.
Megan Kay:So this episoZde is about the history of fire in Nevada, and I wanted to pick your brain with your expertise, and ask if you could paint a picture of what Nevada's range lands used to look like, pre settlement, and compare that to how they look today.
Brad Schultz:That's a really complex question without a simple answer, and that's because in Nevada, you have a lot of environmental gradients, climatically, soils and so forth. And those gradients run from the west side of the state to the east side. Saw summer precipitation increases as you go to the east, and it gets a little colder also north to south, much colder in the north, very hot in the south. And then you have elevation gradients from less than 3000 feet to almost 14,000 feet in parts of the state, and each of those create a very complex landscape. And all these different factors really determine the plant communities you had out there. So on, those lower, drier areas that were formerly lakes and so forth, you have what we call the salt desert shrub community, predominantly shrubs, relatively few grasses, except on sand sheets, where you get a lot of rice grass and so forth. Very arid, very dry, very harsh sites not occupied by a lot of prehistoric peoples, most of the time, unless there were marshes there the terminus of the rivers and so forth. Moving up, you get into the valleys, the alluvial fans. You start in the middle of fans, up across these fans. You can do another we can call the sagebrush grass plant communities going on to the hillsides, more sagebrush and grass, higher elevation, little cooler, more moisture, much more productive. So a very heterogeneous, very dynamic landscape.
Megan Kay:Can I ask you a quick question before we move on? Can you explain what the role of fire was historically?
Brad Schultz:Fire was widespread across much of the sagebrush region. The general role of fire is to reduce woody vegetation, whether it's shrubs or trees, particularly those that don't sprout from the root crown or buds on the roots after any kind of disturbance. Sagebrush is a non sprouter most of our conifer trees are non sprouters. Aspen does sprout after fire. Some of a few other shrubs do as well, but fire would really reduce those shrubs typically the time of year fire burns, mid summer, late summer into the fall. Grasses are dormant. Their growing points are below the ground surface, so they're perennial bunch grasses. There were very few annuals present at that point in time. These bunch grasses are largely unaffected by most fires that would burn that time of year. So bunch grasses would increase after a fire, and then over time, plant succession, vegetation change that occurs. The shrubs would slowly increase, grasses would start to decrease. Fire would come back and return that balance. And across a large landscape, fires would occur periodically, but at different places, at different times, and you would get a very strong mosaic pattern of predominant grasses in some areas, predominantly shrubs in others, and most of it being a mix in between that confers a lot of benefits to the wildlife species that occupy our rangelands in Nevada. There's probably well over 200 species, when we look at birds and mammals, and a small set of those are what we call sagebrush obligates. They require sagebrush, the presence of sagebrush, at least some point in time, every year, within their annual cycle, to survive. If you don't have that sagebrush, they either don't survive or they have incredibly small populations. On the other end, we have a few species that prefer predominantly grasses. They're considered grassland species, and most are somewhere in the middle, that do fairly good with a reasonably good mix of sagebrush shrubs and grasses together, when you get that mosaic across the landscape, do that, that fire mechanism that fire disturbance that occurred periodically, you would end up having this broad mix of different successional classes that would allow all those species to be present in most places and not confined to very small areas of the landscape.
Megan Kay:How often did fire happen?
Brad Schultz:That is a very hotly debated question. It's very difficult to understand that in Nevada, because the best way to document fire history is scars on trees, and most of Nevada has very few long lived trees. They can document that fire history going back hundreds, if not thousands of years. Another part of that really gets forgotten is most people, they're very familiar with lightning. They know lightning causes fires. What everybody forgets about is the role of Native Americans on the landscape. Now, Native American populations weren't overly high large in Nevada, 25,000 or give or take, depending on which anthropologist you want to look at, probably confined to certain areas where water was available year round, along the main rivers, the perennial tributaries, marshes and so forth. But they used fire every day of the year. 24 hours a day, because fire was was used, not just for cooking, but manufacturing that their clothes, their tools, the impediments they need, they needed to survive and so forth. If you had one fire supporting four people and a population of 25,000 people, you probably have 3000, 6000 campfires burning every day. Think about how many campfires escape now, when you have a lot fewer, and the emphasis on putting them out, and none of them burn 24 hours a day, so you probably had some escape fires from that. But they also use fire to manage vegetation, for hunt, to hunt animals. Furs were a primary source of clothing and so forth. So they use fire very extensively to manage landscapes as well. Undoubtedly, some of those got very large, but they and they used them every year, exactly how big fires got, how often they got away, how much they burn, how they burn is really quite speculative, but I would expect that with the very patchy environment you had with your vegetation and so forth, more grasses, some areas, more shrubs than others, that fires, even when they got large, were burned much patchier when they burned into grasslands. They're probably more likely to go out at night, where nowadays, when they burn at night, often burning in heavy fuels, shrubs and so forth. So there's enough fuel to carry those fires through the night and burn the next day.
Megan Kay:And so they were likely to go at night because of like, temperatures and humidity.
Brad Schultz:Temperature and humidity, even a little bit of humidity recovery, we just didn't have the large fuels. Basin wildrye might be the one grass that was an exception, because it can be a very large plant with a large roof, crown and so forth. But there's really a lot of unknowns within that. Native American fires were probably concentrated in certain areas, because their populations were concentrated. And the farther you moved away from that, there was probably less influence. And then the lightning would have been a greater role. The full extent of that is really an unknown.
Megan Kay:84% of wildfires nationwide are caused by people. If you're planning on heading out and enjoying public lands, visit nevadafireinfo.org and learn how you can recreate responsibly and do your part to prevent wildfires. So that mosaic pattern you're talking about, it seems like that was a key part of the landscape, and its ability to withstand fire and not, you know, to experience periodic fire without devastating wildlife and habitats.
Brad Schultz:Yeah, I would, you know, and none of this is really definitive knowledge. It's based on a lot of ads, a mix of anecdotal and small scale studies and looking at patterns and so forth. But when you had that diverse landscape, fuel loads, vary fuel continuity carried, and most large fires are accompanied by at least light to moderate and heavy winds. And when you have that high diversity of fuel continuity and fuel loads, your winds are going to they often get quite square, what we call squirrely and so forth change direction a lot. So that's going to push fire differently than when you have one continuous fuel. If you were to go out and look at the Martin fire when it burned a couple years ago across the Hawaii desert that was one continuous stand of sage brush for mile after mile, very high cover 20, 30% cover or more, no breaks, no discontinuity in that fuel. So it allowed one very long, wide, broad front of a fire to move across the entire southern part of the Hawaii desert. If that had been broken up with 100 acres of fine fuels here, or predominantly grasses here, 1000 acres there, it would have changed the pattern of that fire front, and it would have undoubtedly resulted in a very different burning pattern, probably more unburned islands. There are some large, unburned islands out there now, but it probably would have been much different.
Megan Kay:That's a good segue into kind of talking about what the rangeland and the vegetation and the wildlife look like today, as opposed to historically, with that mosaic pattern.
Brad Schultz:In many ways, it's quite different today than it was prior to settlement by Europeans, one of the first things that happened with European settlement was the massive introduction of livestock to the Great Basin, initially cattle, and then followed by sheep. We had livestock numbers many orders of magnitude greater than today. They graze these areas what we call season long from the time the plants turn green in the spring and the snow melted the entire growing season and clear into the fall and sometimes the winter. Grass plants, while they have many features that tolerate grazing, no grass plant is capable of surviving grazing that occurs the entire growing season every year, year after year. Parallel with that, was the introduction of invasive annual grasses that originated from Europe and Eurasia, probably as a contaminant in the grain seed that was brought over and seeded on the early farms. Cheatgrass later, Medusahead now, Ventenata, is another one that's coming, but predominantly cheatgrass is one everybody's familiar with. These slowly started to spread across the landscape, probably initially following all the infrastructure that was developed. This allowed them to move across the landscape, and then that started to interact with a lot of the other natural non human disturbances out there.
Megan Kay:So cattle production, you outlined how important that was to the change. But what about fire and fire suppression? And like human just humans suppressing fire because they're building houses in there. How they have settlements.
Brad Schultz:The settlement and the widespread grazing, it decreased the amount of fine fuels. And fine fuels are where most ignition would occur in the summertime, from lightning, Native American burning completely went away by about 1900 probably even earlier than that. It was, it was almost non existent. So that source of fire was gone. Settlers, there was some burning periodically. But the the European attitude towards fire was, fire is generally bad on the landscape. We don't want to burn things past history from where they came from. It's a reflection of that, and it's also they're seeing their forage, potential forage, go away for a couple of years when fires burn. So it was that.
Megan Kay:It was like a matter of survival. They're like, we can't that's our food source stop the fire from.
Brad Schultz:So human caused fire initially went way down, and so you didn't have the sources out there, and you didn't have the fine fuels to ignite as easily and to initially carry a fire, particularly in non windy conditions, where you get a lot of small fires, and our large fires, even prior to settlement, were probably a very small part of the total number of fires, but they probably burnt the most acreage. But did it happen every year? Every five years, every 10 years? That that's really an unknown will probably never be answered.
Megan Kay:So how often is fire happening now? It seems like it's, there's a ton of fire.
Brad Schultz:So in your lower elevations, where cheatgrass has become predominant. Fire is much more frequent than it used to be. Some areas, I've seen some areas burn three or four times since I've been here in Winnemucca, and that was really common. Where were what most of our fires were, these heat grass driven fires before about 2000, 2005 since about 2005 I've seen an increase in our large fires in our mid and upper elevations that are sage brush driven, shrub driven, most of these areas have a at least a decent understory of perennial grasses today, and they often come back largely as perennial grasslands. But those areas, typically, a lot of them, haven't burned in probably over 100 years, maybe even much longer. And it's a combination of this historic livestock grazing that reduced those fine fuels early on, followed by a very intensive fire suppression era starting in the 1930s that lack of fire, that lack of disturbance, never set the shrubs back, never decreased them across very large expenses, hundreds of thousands of acres, million acres or more, at times, and those shrubs have slowly increased. You're getting 20, 25, 30% shrub cover. And every one of those sagebrush plants has about 300 different volatile oils in it that are highly flammable. So a sagebrush plant that's three foot tall can easily put off probably a 9-15 foot length flame, especially when it's windy. And if you have two to four feet between plants, and you get some wind, it pushes that flame over from plant to plant. And when you've got 50 miles like you had on the Martin fire of continuous sagebrush like that, that's highly flammable in a very dry year with a good understory of bunch grasses, and most of it that fire can move incredibly fast and incredibly far, very
Megan Kay:Something that is interesting to me, when we're talking about the history of fire, is, and I keep going back to what you were talking about, it's a lot of it is largely speculative, because we it's not like other ecosystems where you can study tree rings and scars. I'm just curious as to because this is sort of an ongoing field of study and topic, how much does understanding the history of fire play into current land management and how it's evolving?
Brad Schultz:Well, I think what the history of fire in the Great Basin in sagebrush grass zone tells us is you need some amount of periodic disturbance that's going to reduce the shrubs for some period of time and maintain the bunch grasses, or allow the bunch grasses to fully occupy the site. But in today's world, it's really not so much about fire as understanding disturbance and how it affects that shrub grass relationship, you're not going to use fire the same way the current prior to settlement. We've got new players, more people on the landscape, more infrastructure that we don't want to burn. We've got an invasive species that can respond to it, so it's not appropriate every place, but disturbance of some type is is still going to be needed to maintain that shrub grass balance, so that we have what we call resilient plant communities. By resilience, we're talking enough bunch grasses on site that when a fire or some other disturbance happens, they immediately occupy the site. They remain on the site to competitively exclude those undesired species and keep them from taking over more and more of a landscape. Fires, I think has a definite role in some areas. We have that good bunch grass under story and you can control it. One thing I don't think we've looked at is using fire outside the time frames we've normally done it. I think a lot of these sage brush areas, if you could get the right equipment out there, helicopters, drip torches in December or January, when you've got six inches of snow on the ground, you could burn a lot of small areas, half acre, quarter acre, couple acres, And a very patchy environment, and have absolutely no effect on that herbaceous understory and the soil that hasn't been looked at at all, but I think there's tremendous opportunity for that. It might provide opportunities in those areas where cheatgrass is the predominant understory species. I haven't thought about that as much, but there probably are potential opportunities there as well.
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Jamie Roice-Gomes:So Brad, the narrative that we hear a lot is that there's too much fire in the rangeland ecosystems now, right? And there's too little fire in the forest ecosystems. Can you talk about that a little bit? Are there? Are there kind of zones within the Rangeland Ecosystem where there might be too little fire versus too much fire?
Brad Schultz:I would say definitely yes. I think a lot of our mid and upper elevations have probably, especially those that haven't burned in the last 100 or more years, have probably had too little fire. And when you talk about fire, you can't just talk about the presence or absence of fire, but you have to talk about the size of it. And we're not talking about large scale fires. We're talking about a lot of small and small has different connotations to different people. A few acres here, a few acres there, 100 acres there, and maybe some in the 1000-2000 acre, but it's and then it's also the configuration of that, you know, 1000 acres square has much different effect on how a landscape is used and the animals that use it. Than 1000 acres, that's a long corridor, say, 300 feet wide on average. So, you know, you can't just say fire. It's how fire occurs, the size of it, the relationship of one patch is burned to another. Fire is a very complex it's not an off on switch.
Unknown:And also, what happens, where the fire occurs, the effects, what conditions Is it burning under? What's the severity of fire? How does it influence the soil, etc, right? So there's a lot of complexities to what the fire does to the landscape, but it does seem like in our cheatgrass invaded ecosystems, that's where we're seeing this re-burn cycle happening too close together.
Brad Schultz:Oh, without a doubt, and a lot of those areas, this fire was probably on a 50 to 75 year return interval. And you're talking three to five maybe 10 years now, and you'll never get probably the bunch grasses coming back, and definitely not the sagebrush and the non sprouting shrubs. You're actually seeing an increase in shrubs like horse brush and rabbit brush that sprout right after fire. They have buds on the root, crown of the roots that get regrow stems then they fire. Is very positive on them. They respond to it very well, and they're generally undesired species at a high abundance.
Megan Kay:Yeah. I mean the just in the Reno area, like that Caughlin fire that was, I feel like that, that hill up in Caughlin ranch burns like every five to seven years. It seems like.
Brad Schultz:And I would add that just because an area may have burned frequently prior to settlement doesn't mean fire is the best disturbance mechanism for managing that landscape now, a lot of things have changed.
Megan Kay:What other disturbance mechanisms are there that are commonly used.
Brad Schultz:Insects and pests. We have a defoliating moth that occurs periodically throughout the Great Basin, the Aroga moth, and it can defoliate vast areas of sagebrush.
Megan Kay:What does defoliate mean?
Brad Schultz:Take the leaves off.
Megan Kay:Okay, well that makes sense.
Brad Schultz:So they eat the leaves. And sagebrush is actually a very grazing, intolerant plant. It's most of the bugs that produce new growth from year to year are on the outer inch of the stems. So if you defoliate that part of the plant, you kill it very easily and and there are some large tracks of Northern Nevada that just in the last five to 10 years have been defoliated by these insects. And if they have a good bunch grass under story, those bunch grasses occupy the site, you have good resilience, and you have the ability of sagebrush to slowly return to a site if you don't have bunch grasses. In the end of story, that's when you start to get the annual grasses. Some of our intense, prolonged droughts that occur periodically can dramatically reduce or even kill off sagebrush in some areas, generally not large tracks, but it does happen. On the other extreme, we tend to think wet years are very, very good and very beneficial, but you can get too wet, and that can also be a disturbance. If you get saturated soils for too long. In some areas, you can kill a lot of sagebrush that way as well. So there's those latitude flooding, drought typically occur at smaller scales, but they are also present on the landscape.
Megan Kay:And then so in other ecosystems, prescribed fire is used. Is there? What other disturbances, you know, human trying to mimic natural ones. But like, what? How? What other ways can humans or land managers, you know, create these disturbances to try to restore these resilient landscape?
Brad Schultz:Well, looking back at the pre settlement area, something nobody thinks about today is if you had 25,000 Native Americans on the landscape, and they burned fires 24 hours a day in their camps. What fuel did they use? Sagebrush was our most predominant fuel potential fuel on the landscape. How much sagebrush did they harvest, and how did that affect that shrub balance, grass ratio? And I've only really heard one other person talk about their harvesting of sagebrush, our rancher here in the Winnemucca area. But I think that's something really worth looking at, and perhaps our mowing to some degree mimics that herbicides have been attempted. I forget the name of the one that's used quite often, but it's a granule, granular herbicide that they spread under, underneath the plants. And over time, in some settings, it has slowly reduced, killed off sagebrush, or not generally, not every plant, but it dramatically reduces the amount of sagebrush that's out there. And one of the benefits of that herbicide is it's generally a slow acting so you don't change a lot fast, and we don't have a lot of bunch grasses in the understory. That's probably better than taking too much sage brush out too fast. What it really comes down to is any treatment, thinking about it strategically, all the different uses that are out there, the potential adverse impacts that could happen, and identifying the best locations for each type of treatment. No one type of management treatment is appropriate every place. They all probably have some utility someplace. And then we often tend to want to do things once and have everything turn out perfect. A lot of the management going forward is going to be multiple different actions, a series of different actions. Some might occur simultaneously, some might be sequential. And then how does that sequence and that timing differ from one ecological site to another? It may not. It's undoubtedly not going to be the same every place. And those are complexities that take a lot of thought and understanding of the overall ecology area before you can really figure out what is most likely to be most appropriate. And it's about probabilities. There are no 100% guarantees other than, if we do nothing, we're going to end up with something we don't want.
Jamie Roice-Gomes:Brad's point that our, our, our biggest mistake is not doing anything at all, right? And so, you know, because essentially, what happened, you know, is there was all this kind of manipulation of the landscape with grazing or logging in the forest, right? So, so you have these like significant impacts happening, but you're not thoughtfully managing for adaptation, ecosystem health resilience alongside those disturbances that you're introducing. And so then you get all out of out of sync, and so, you know, we need to continuously manage and interact with the ecosystems that we live in and that surround the areas in which we live, because we are so ingrained and part of the system that if you just leave them alone entirely, that's not a sustainable path for us.
Brad Schultz:These these lands have been managed, used by people since way before European settlers got here.
Jamie Roice-Gomes:Yeah, 10s of 1000s of years.
Brad Schultz:As far back as Native Americans go, which may be 30,000 years or more in different areas, and we're using it, starting to use a concept today. The term I've heard recently is outcome based management. Well, that's the same thing Native Americans were doing when they were here, they were managing landscapes for outcomes they wanted based upon their needs. So it's really not a new concept, we're just never been put in those terms before, but it's, you know, it's outcome based management, and that's deciding based on the capability of what your lands are, what resources you want them to produce, and then what suite of management actions does it take to achieve those outcomes?
Megan Kay:Thank you for listening to the Living with Fire Podcast, you can find more stories about wildfire and other resources at livingwithfire.com the Living with Fire program is funded by the University of Nevada, Reno Extension, Nevada Division of Forestry, Bureau of Land Management and the United States Forest Service.
