Wildland fire plays a natural and necessary role in shaping the composition, structure, and ecological processes of many of the world's ecosystems. Species adaptations to fire are many and varied; depending on the plant communities present in a given fire regime, fire can help to induce seed release, flowering or fruiting in shrubs, and seral changes in stands with trees having fire-resistant or growth-related fire adaptations. Fire also helps to clear fuel buildup in understories, cleanse areas of disease and insect outbreaks, and/or cycle nutrients into the soil.

Prompted by resource interests (i.e., timber extraction) and social objectives (e.g., protection of homes built along the urban-wildland interface), suppression dominated fire management policies in the U.S. for much of the 20th century. While it remains a prevalent management response in this country, the link between suppression-related fuel build-up and catastrophic wildfires has seen growing recognition, and the advancement of fire science has improved the capacity of managers to address individual fires with more discretion depending on their specific ecological and social contexts.

To learn more about fire ecology and fire science, visit the links below and throughout this page:

• The Joint Fire Science Program (JFSP), a partnership of six federal agencies, was established in 1998 to provide scientific information and support for wildland fuel and fire management programs.
• The U.S. Fire Learning Network's California Klamath-Siskiyou FLN implemented the methodology to map Fire Regime Condition Class, or FRCC, a measure of the degree to which the vegetation and disturbance regime of a given area are departed from historical conditions. The Intermountain West FLN is presently offering this innovative technology and other quantitative tools to help five landscape-scale projects achieve fire and other conservation goals.
• The California Fire and Resource Assessment Program The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection's Fire and Resource Assessment Program (FRAP) provides reports on California's forests and rangelands. It also includes information for statewide fire threat, fire hazard, watersheds, socio-economic conditions, environmental indicators, and forest-related climate change, as well as descriptive maps of these topics.
• The California Fire Alliance The California Fire Alliance site has variety of information for property owners as well as agency employees and the general public.