Prescribed Fire Services
Nevada City
Restore Balance with “good fire” on your land!
Humans have used fire as a tool since ancient times. In an era of unprecedented catastrophic wildfire, we believe in returning to the wisdom of “good fire”.
With “good fire” we can not only protect your home and community, but we can nourish the land and ecosystem. Landscapes that burn frequently become fire resilient in the face of wildfire.
​
Within the realm of prescribed burning there is broadcast burning and pile burning. With broadcast burning, fire is applied to the entire landscape and intended to consume fine fuels and thin out understory vegetation. In order to consume larger woody fuels, however, especially those generated from thinning activities, we construct piles. Piles are left to cure and then burned at a later time, typically during a period with high fuel moistures.
Our team of fire practitioners can safely and skillfully apply fire to public or private lands to achieve a host of objectives including: hazardous fuels reduction, invasive species control, forest maintenance, and more. Our burn bosses are State Certified in Prescribed-Fire (CARx) and can implement burns on a wide range of scale and fuel types.
We work closely with CalFire and local air districts to obtain permits and project approval. We maintain a nimble ability to mobilize our crew when suitable prescribed-burn weather conditions present.
Prescribed fire can be a highly cost effective method of protecting your property and it offers many additional ecological benefits that other methods do not.
Fire is an essential ingredient in our “brittle” climate where our summers are hot and dry and opportunities for biological decomposition are minimal. While we do receive an abundance of precipitation through the winter, unfortunately, this does not coincide with enough warmth to encourage sufficient fungal decomposition to keep pace with the annual accumulation of dead vegetation. Fire largely replaces biological decomposition in this climate.
Fire consumes dead vegetation, creating ash and stable carbon while reducing fuel loading across the landscape. Whereas mechanical treatments such as broadcast chipping and mastication are very effective at rearranging vegetation, they often leave excessive dead fuel accumulations spread across the landscape which can still burn intensely during a wildfire and often remain in place for over a decade after the treatment.
Many properties have not burned in over 100 years due to the suppression of fire. In that time, the forest has changed. There are more trees and more unhealthy trees than ever before, and there are extreme levels of forest litter accumulation. Implementing a prescribed burn on your property can be a huge step in returning your land to health and protecting your home. After the initial prescribed burn on your property, a “fire return interval” of between five and ten years is recommended as a way to keep your land open and fire resilient.