Diverse Partnership Fosters Fire-resilient Forests

The Northern Blues Restoration Partnership is now five years into a 10-year project working to protect communities from wildfire, restore biodiversity and reintroduce healthy fire to the landscape in Northeast Oregon.

Fire ecologists say more than 100 years of aggressive logging paired with fire suppression in the West has set the stage for catastrophic wildfires.

Kaci Radcliffe, forest restoration project manager for the partnership, said with guidance from Indigenous burning practices along with decades of research, the relationship to fire is shifting.

“Land managers now are saying, ‘Well, we were trying to stop this thing; control it,'” Radcliffe explained. “We actually need to welcome it back in a way that feels like it’s safe for our communities but really results in much better outcomes than we could do without it.”

Made up of a coalition of tribes, state agencies, landowners, and NGOs, the partnership is working on 10 million acres across 13 counties in Northeast Oregon and Southeast Washington.

Micah Schmidt, northeast regional fire specialist for the Oregon State University Extension Fire Program, another member of the partnership, aims to equip more people with the skills and resources to conduct prescribed burns on nonfederal lands. It is being done through job training with the Northwest Youth Corps and public weekend trainings.

“No matter how much funding we throw at any agency to fund this work and do that, it all helps a ton, but we need individuals to take things into their own hands,” Schmidt urged. “Because we have a huge landscape and landowners and individuals that want to do some work are going to be a big piece of that.”

Radcliffe stressed the challenge is so large, working together is key, adding any effort needs to activate local expertise.

“We found that a place-based collaboration is the way for us to sustain each other and actually start to make progress on the problem,” Radcliffe added.

Research, including a study of Oregon’s 2021 Bootleg Fire, shows forests treated with mechanical thinning and prescribed burns significantly reduced fire severity and made firefighting safer.