Not all flame's the same
Fire has played a significant role in shaping landscapes throughout history, sparked by both lightning and the intentional use of fire by Indigenous peoples. Fire enabled people to manage and adapt to their local ecosystems, helping them produce food, tools, materials, and medicines, as well as maintain prairies, clearings and travel routes. It also helped reduce the risk of larger, more destructive fires by preventing the accumulation of excess fuel. Beyond human use, fire serves vital ecological functions, such as clearing dead vegetation, recycling nutrients, creating habitats for plants and animals, promoting germination and new growth and controlling insects and diseases. The curtailment of cultural burning, combined with over a century of fire suppression, has profoundly transformed landscapes—altering the distribution, density, structure, and composition of vegetation across ecoregions
Oregon is a very diverse state, from the coast to the Cascade Mountains and the Great Basin. Because of this, it makes sense that the way fire behaves also varies across the state. In other words, fire happens in different patterns and has different effects. This resource explains the role of fire in seven of Oregon’s ecoregions.
