August 25, 2026: Breakout topic #1

What is unique about eastern wildfires?

Group A

  • For how long did oak dominate pre euroamerican settlement or did it arise with the big land clearing efforts of the 1800s?
  • Prolonged dry season starting from April until Fall
  • Fire-dependent ecosystem land management, needs to be addressed to the private land owners
  • PA context: state and townships have more ownership, more authority than the Fed
  • More commercial land (since 2003 not revisited in PA-context) that is not commercial as a carbon land, but it counts as fuel, and exacerbated CO2 composition
  • In FL burned land, carbon is stable
  • Structure complexity: maintain high species and diversity
  • Who is going to be a firefighter and legacy, now that people are aging
  • PA is doing more prescribed burn than NY, dedicating as a volunteer is hard
  • Fire trucks price are higher, drastic jump, having so many small fire departments in NY-PA, only small people can understand structure
  • Local fire cost disproportionally fast for tax utilization, just million for the engines
  • Volunteer takes long time to train, huge commitment, so fire dept lacks firefighters who really understand and experience fires
  • Big oaks timber is not going to comeback, have so many invasive species as of now, we cannot go back to old pre-european (same fuels, same species), and LULCC
  • Partially impacted forest system
  • Metrics differently: carbon, hydrology, fuel loads
  • PA prescribed vs wildfire should end up as a controlled fire regardless
  • South-Southeast has sustained cultural burning for a long time, meanwhile in midwest deemed as bad fire, and have to be managed
  • Find an investor who can manage the fire in private lands, to have desired outcome (not burned uncontrollably)
  • The fire people might be passionate about fire and not paid enough
  • To create an experienced firefighter, they need to do prescribed

Distinct Climate and Fire Ecology

  • Extended dry season April through fall drives fire risk, including tree die-off and fires along Appalachian ridges
  • Leaf-off/leaf-on dynamics and variable wind patterns (e.g., low wind in Ohio vs. other regions) shape fire behavior differently than the West
  • Fire-dependent ecosystems persist on ridgetop sites, which risk losing taxa to carbon development and shading without fire
  • The East is ecologically diverse across ecoregions but tends to be lumped together in federal management — "Florida fire is not PA fire"

Novel and Non-Analog Ecosystems

  • Current species composition is fundamentally different from pre-colonial forests due to chestnut blight, Dutch elm disease, spongy moth, and pervasive invasives
  • Oak dominance was likely a product of 19th-century clearcutting and subsequent fire, not a stable pre-European baseline — it cannot be maintained without that same level of disturbance
  • 150+ years of fuel accumulation on non-commercial lands; areas seen as carbon sinks are actually dying and becoming fuel loads
  • We are managing remnant/artifact forests yet still default to "replace like with like" thinking despite knowing it's not historically accurate
  • Novel ecosystems from land use change (LULCC) and invasives mean there may be no true restoration target

Fragmented Land Ownership and Governance

  • Eastern landscape is highly fractured — private, township, state, and federal lands intermixed, with PA townships and commonwealth holding more authority than federal agencies
  • Neighbor behavior and cross-boundary coordination are central challenges
  • Fire-dependent private lands lack mechanisms to fund or coordinate management
  • PA context: more prescribed burning than NY, but governance at the local/township level makes coordinated management difficult
  • Finding investors or mechanisms to fund prescribed fire on private lands is critical

Workforce, Capacity and the Volunteer Crisis

  • Volunteer fire departments are aging out with no clear succession pipeline
  • Training is time-intensive (roughly a month commitment), making recruitment difficult as people have less time to volunteer
  • New personnel meet qualifications on paper but lack depth of experience — low-complexity fires are where less-experienced firefighters get hurt
  • Fire truck costs have skyrocketed with limited availability; small departments can no longer sustain equipment costs, eroding the cost savings that made volunteerism economical
  • RX fire passion is essential — culture and desire to burn drives participation more than pay, but the east has fewer opportunities for both prescribed and wildfire experience

Culture, Perception and Communication

  • Strong cultural burning legacy in the South and Southeast; fire viewed as "bad" in northern geographies (midwest, Adirondacks), where perception persists that catastrophic fire is a western problem
  • Communication gap during wildfire burnout operations — public needs to understand the use of fire as a suppression tool
  • Research legacy in the Southeast gives practitioners a strong knowledge base; PA and NY are earlier in that learning curve
  • Getting landowners and the public to believe in fire-dependent management — and in pre-colonial forest conditions as a goal — remains a cultural challenge

Economics and Investment

  • Low-value timber sites make traditional cost-recovery models for land management unworkable
  • RX fire prep costs are higher in the East; alternatives like mechanical treatment may cost even more
  • Local fire department costs are growing disproportionately relative to tax base
  • Quantifying risk reduction is inherently difficult — you can't easily measure what didn't burn
  • Investment in qualified personnel is necessary even at a loss; the long-term cost curve comes down over time

7. Metrics, Science and Management Targets

  • No good regional metric for forest health or target conditions, especially in highly diverse and non-analog systems
  • Reference watersheds are diverse and hard to define; top-down modeling without ground-truth baselines is a limitation
  • FL has an advantage: parts never stopped burning, providing reference ecosystems and a deep research legacy on fire effects
  • Need to think in terms of fire regimes rather than single fire events
  • Landowners lack access to fire research; diverse ecosystems make predicting post-fire response difficult

Group B

Fire regime characteristics- inherent

Climate , topography, burn history

  1. Frequent small fires
  2. Perception of fire itself is unique
  3. The way fire suppression is managed is also unique - how we respond to fire, preparation to address the fire management is unique in the east.
  4. Less experience in tackling extended fire
  5. Fires burn deeper because of thick duff layers
  6. Public response is also unique while fire doesn't stop burning in days and producing smoke.
  7. Number of people coming into the hospital- the doctors are not ready with respiratory diseases, and with increasing risk that's going to be a problem
  8. The population is different, people are more spread out.
  9. Preparedness for the smoke and they are attuned to fire risk
  10.  Different fire regime within the east
  11.  Research in prescribed burning is also very scarce.
  12.  Structure of climate is also very unique - such as dry spell indices, DSDI or
  13. Definition of extreme, how do we define it?
  14. 1.5 sd from the local norm?
  15. The baseline of climatic trend is different which makes the fire indices different
  16. How are fuel behaves is also different from the out west
  17. How much change makes it a extreme change
  18.  Compound effects such as landuse, insects, climate (ENSO), ice storms, hurricane, and so forth.
  19. Telecollection such as ENSO, decadal seasonality how they are extending and shifting the climate
  20. Topography and aspect plays important role- linear distribution in the west compared to east
  21. Historical burn history also plays a role -post settlement, to indigenous to modern- cultures of fire is different
    • Is historical relevance is more relevant in the east than it used to be before?
    • Succession trajectory
    • Mesophication
  22. Highly fragmented land ownership. An unified command is very different than cal fires. Its easier to do wildland fire management in a national forest than a private fragmented landscape.
  23. Jurisdictional complexities
    • Logistical experience- interoperability is not well established here in the east. Thus, managing this ‘system’ should be a priority, having an agreement is important/make fighting fire less complex.
    • “Who responds first?” / “Who handles first”?/“Who should respond first?”- questions to resolve.
    • Fine-scale operation, cost of fire trucks, and other logistics, how to operate these detailed management operations. Communication is a huge problem, such as radio-connectivity/system.
  24. Health issues post wildfires, VFD sites. Mental health
  25. Emergency responses - PTSD post-fire.
  26. How does the educational preparedness is different from west coast? Familiarity with wildfire.
  27. How does smoke behave differently from the western wildfire smoke? Humidity and smoke is a NONO ? visibility went down dramatically with creation of fog!

Group C

  • Land tenure and ownership- far less public land than in the western US
    • East has a lot of privately owned land- what does that mean in terms of who makes decisions
    • Relationships of private land owners and the government- private views of how people manage their land
  • Very different liability laws for private land prescribed burners
    • West Virginia certified prescribed burn manager program, NY has just created a prescribed fire council.
    • Prescribed Fire- forest health and resilience plus wildfire mitigation
    • certified RX fire in PA for liability protections, but private landowners cannot burn in wooded properties- state limits land owners, they can only burn grasslands
  • Insurance for prescribed fire is a big issue but varies from north to south as a limitation to burning.
    • Cost prohibitive insurance in northeast while the southeast is much more affordable
    • TNC limited for helping RX fire with private landowners and state partners in PA
    • Potential benefit in that the southeast has a model for more affordable insurance?
      • Landuse issues in the northeast- landuse is local municipality where as in other states its at the county level- differences among states may limit this translation between southeast and northeast
    • Limitations on prescribed fire application in northeast, and can vary by state
      • 15,000 acre threshold in PA for prescribed fire- not enough capacity even with enough burn days to get enough fire on the ground.
    • Capacity for disaster management is limited in many states
      • Qualification limitations in the PA and other areas.
      • Certified prescribed burn manager program in Florida make for better capacity that is limited in the northeast
    • Prescribed burn associations are patchy across the region
      • In the southeast there are a lot more PBAs where there are more limited.
      • Can the Great Plains be a model for PBA development and motivation?
      • How can the southeast be a model or motivation in the northeast
    • Changing vegetation under climate and landcover change in the future- east has alot of development and different vegetation which will make these more changes unique from the west
      • Trees are responding to higher temperatures and using more water, which is impacting stream flows
      • Changing flash drought regimes
      • How can the health of trees relative to shifting climate impact the wildfire risk in the future?
      • What types of vegetation in forests will we have here in the future?
      • Landclearing and management- how will that impact changes in vegetation?
      • Replanting trees of different species to increase resilience to more fire adapted species.
    • Lack of fuel modelling knowledge in the region- we do not use fire modelling as much because they don’t seem accurate. Lack of fuel models that represent the fuels here.