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Fire Management
What to Know About Fires
The Boise National Forest encompasses over 2.5 million acres of diverse forest and grassland. Every year, the forest fire staff manages over 100 wildland fires within those acres.
Fire behavior is influenced by weather, topography and fuel. Fuel removal options are few like thinning, logging and prescribed burning, or a combination of these options can be addressed by fire management.
Wildland fires are a force of nature that can be nearly as impossible to prevent, and as difficult to control, as hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods.
Wildland fire can be beneficial or destructive. In the right place at the right time, wildland fire can create many environmental benefits, such as reducing dry grasses, brush, and trees that can fuel large and severe wildfires and improving wildlife habitat. In the wrong place at the wrong time, wildfires can wreak havoc by threatening lives, homes, communities, along with natural and cultural resources.
The Forest Service has been managing wildland fire on National Forests and Grasslands for more than 100 years. However, the Forest Service doesn’t do it alone. Instead, the agency works closely with other federal, tribal, state, and local partners. And homeowners can do their part with creating defensible space around their property.
This is more important than ever, because over the last few decades the wildland fire management environment has profoundly changed. Longer fire seasons that attain bigger fires and more acres burned on average each year; more extreme fire behavior; and wildfire suppression operations in the wildland urban interface (WUI) have become the norm.
To address these challenges, the Forest Service and its other federal, tribal, state, and local partners have developed and are implementing a National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy. that has three key components: resilient landscapes, fire adapted communities, and safe and effective wildfire response.
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Wildfire Prevention
We can all help make the world a safer place by learning more about how and why wildfires start.
From understanding current fire danger levels, to wildfire preparations for homeowners, to ways to do your part to prevent wildfires, teaching people about wildfires is an important part of what we do.
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Prescribed Fire
Prescribed burns are sometimes conducted to remove an excess of vegetation in areas that could become a large, intense wildland fire if ignited unintentionally, either by lightning or people.
These prescribed fires are conducted within a “prescription” that defines the location, fuel moisture levels, air temperatures, wind conditions, and relative humidity levels that are appropriate for each project.
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Wildfire
Get current updates by viewing the National wildfire Coordinating Group (NWCG) map.
A few quick references:
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Report a wildfire: (208) 384-3400
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In case of an emergency call 911
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Fire Hire
What to fulfill your passion by getting into a Boise NF fire job? This field captures a broad field of work with not just firefighters, but hand & engine crews, prevention, dispatch, lookouts plus more!
Understand more about Region 4 temporary seasonal wildland fire jobs.
Smoke
The following websites are great resources for smoke information: