About Prescribed Burning
Reduce Fire Hazard | Restore Forest Health and Resilience | Enhance Native Plants
What is Prescribed Fire or Controlled Burning?
Prescribed fire or controlled burning is a tool used for good land stewardship. For more than 150 years, fires have been supressed. Forests have grown dense, and the fuel has built up. As a result, wildfires are more intense and often damaging.
Low-intensity controlled burns can be used to improve defensible space, clean up forest debris and restore forest and soil health.
Why Burn?
- Lower fire hazard and make communities safer
- Enhance forest health and resilience
- Increase wildlife habitat
- Improved forage
- Restore and enhance native wildflowers
- Control pests (like ticks) and invasive grasses and weeds
If we step up and educate ourselves about beneficial fire and learn how to safely put it on the ground, we can return the land to health and shrink the severity of wildfire in our state. We can do this by applying good fire to our property, helping neighbors with their property, bit by bit, acre by acre. The state of California has recognized the importance of prescribed fire as a tool to combat catastrophic fires. They have ambitious goals for increasing the acres burned by private landowners. Our goal is to help our neighborhoods be safer and restore the fire adapted forests and ecosystems so they are resilient to wildfire.
NCRCD has created a comprehensive fire curriculum, ABC's of Prescribed Burning, that is FREE. Follow our newsletters, check our calendar and sign up for as many classes as you can. Share with friends and family. Let’s change our relationship with fire from fear and resistance to trust and cooperation. Our future is in our hands.
Our Approach
To give community members the knowledge and skills they need to take care of their land with good stewardship. For the NCRCD prescribed fire program, that includes:
Watch a video of a small neighborhood burn in the Lower Colfax Firewise Community:
Neighbors helping neighbors with prescribed burns to make their homes and forests safer. The Lower Colfax Firewise Community has formed a team of community members under the leadership of Dario Davidson to help each other do small prescribed burns in their defensible space.
