Prescribed burns are key to reducing wildfire risk, but federal agencies are lagging

LOS ANGELES — When wildfire burned through a federal research area in Klamath National Forest this summer, scientists were dismayed to see more than 20 years of work go up in smoke.

But when they returned to the charred study area near California’s northern border, they realized they’d been given a unique opportunity.

Although the scientists had set out to understand how the thinning and controlled burning of vegetation could help regrow large trees more quickly, they now had a chance to study another urgent question: Could these same treatments make forests more resilient to wildfire? Or more specifically, could they moderate fire behavior so that flames were less intense and firefighters would have a better chance of snuffing a blaze before it barreled into a populated area?

The answer appeared to be a resounding yes.

“In areas where we didn’t do anything, the untreated controls, the predominant fire behavior was a crown fire which killed every tree and consumed the entire tree crown,” said Eric Knapp, research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service.

However, the plots that had