Learning from the past, a study of fire history from sites across the eastern United States provides guidance for designing modern day forest management to restore fire-adapted and dependent ecosystems such as oak and pine savannas, woodlands, and mixedwoods.

Fire was a significant disturbance across the United States for millennia, determining the distribution of species and the character of ecosystems. However, people have suppressed fire from much of the United States and drastically altered fire regimes in novel ways by significantly increasing the size and frequency of high severity fires that seriously degrade ecosystems, watersheds, and landscapes, and put communities at risk. Nationally, we realize that we must learn how to live with fire and that one way to combat the threats and risks of wildfires is to use prescribed fire. The return of managed or prescribed fire is critical to restoration of fire-adapted and fire-dependent ecosystems that are so important to providing wildlife habitat, conservation of native diversity, wildfire risk reduction, protection of communities, and increase resilience and adaptation to future climate stresses and biotic threats to the nation’s natural heritage. Northern Research Station scientists have been reconstructing the fire history on National and State Forests using dendrochronological methods to date fire scar with tree rings. These fire histories reveal valuable information about fire frequency, severity, seasonality, size, and type that can be used to inform modern day fire management and ecosystem restoration.