Fire as a forest management tool: prescribed burning in the southern United States. Unasylva 41(3

This article describes the use of prescribed burning as a forest and rangeland management tool in the southern United States. The use of fire in the forests of the United States has come full cycle. Early settlers found Indians using fire in virgin pine stands and adopted the practice themselves to provide better access, to facilitate hunting, to reduce the threat of lightning fires and, most important, to improve the quantity and quality of forage for cattle. Destructive wildfires resulting from logging left millions of hectares of forest land in the southern United States devoid of trees, while the practice of annual burning to "freshen up " the range eliminated pine regeneration. The increasing wildfire problem, coupled with the need for a fire-free interval of several years to allow the pines to become re-established, led many foresters to advocate the exclusion of all fire from the woods. Others, however, pointed out that fire might have a place in the management of many southern ecosystems, especially those dominated by longleaf pine. The misconceptions and controversy surrounding the deliberate use of fire to achieve resource management objectives have slowly been replaced by facts. As knowledge accumulated, the use of prescribed fire grew