Experts Are Preparing Forests For Wildfires With Purposeful Blazes

Ecologists and volunteers are prescribing fire in some hard-hit forests to prepare for the next season of extreme conditions.

This past summer, wildfires burned 6.5 million acres, incinerating entire forests. Southern Oregon's Bootleg Fire tore through nearly half a million acres with such intensity it created its own weather.

But something different happened when the fire reached The Nature Conservancy's 30,000-acre Sycan Marsh Preserve — it dropped to the forest floor, and the bigger trees survived. 

Steve Rondeau is the Natural Resources director for the Klamath Tribes, a nature conservancy partner in managing the preserve. He showed the difference between green grass and life on one side of a road there and charred trees and dead grass on the other — validating the tree thinning and prescribed burning the Nature Conservancy has been doing since 2005. The goal is to restore the forest's natural ability to survive fire, and it worked.