Prescribed Burn Frequency in East Texas

Wildfires can be an extremely positive phenomenon for many ecosystems if they occur at certain intervals. Concerns have been voiced with regard to specific locations in East Texas which have not experienced natural or man-made fires with enough frequency.

Identification

• A prescribed burn frequency is the regularity or frequency with which a designated area needs to be exposed to fire. This applies to environmental locations rife with uncontrolled undergrowth. With regard to Texas, officials are particularly concerned with Angelina State Park and its Inland Island Wilderness just outside the city of Zavalla.

Context

• Since its formal designation as a wilderness area in the 1970s, the reserve has not seen any prescribed burns and there has been only little natural occurrence of fire. Safe, frequent fires help the ecosystem and prevent the dangerous accumulation of flammable materials. As of 2010, the Sierra Club and National Forestry Service (NFS) have been negotiating the proper approach to the reinstitution of prescribed burns.

Considerations

• The Sierra Club has presented the NFS with a series of conditions it sees as necessary for responsible burns. Among them is that the frequency of prescribed burns should be equal to that estimated as occurring naturally in ideal circumstances. In devising this estimation, involved parties attempt to formulate what the burn frequency would have been before human involvement disturbed those natural patterns.