WOODSTOCK — Smoke rose from a hillside one afternoon last week as more than a dozen members of the Forest Service conducted a prescribed burn on a 28-acre parcel near where the Appalachian Trail crosses Route 12.
The burn last Thursday was part of an annual effort in the Green Mountain National Forest to maintain wildlife habitat and reduce the potency of wildfires.
Each year, the Forest Service identifies about 1,000 acres in Vermont that would benefit from controlled burns, though the actual acreage burned is usually less due to constraints such as weather conditions, said Ryan Hughes, forest fire management officer with the Green Mountain and Finger Lakes national forests.
One of the main goals of prescribed burns in Vermont is to maintain and create early successional habitat, or areas of grasses and shrubs that don’t have a canopy of trees.
About 78% of the land in the state is forested, according to the Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation, and many species such as upland birds, turkeys and deer rely on these gaps in the trees, which are prioritized in the GMNF’s management plan.
“What we’re really trying to do is knock back some of that woody encroachment as the forest kind of moves out into the wildlife opening,” Hughes said.
Another benefit of prescribed burns is limiting fuel available for wildfires. In the spring when grasses and shrubs are dry and dormant, they can more easily ignite. Burning those fuel sources in a controlled way can reduce the potency of wildfires by limiting their spread.
The best days for controlled burns are sunny with low humidity and a light wind to help the fire move across the landscape, Hughes said. Most of these burn days occur in the spring, but occasionally the Forest Service will conduct burns in the fall.
Severe drought conditions, such as those last fall, can make prescribed fires more resource intensive and too much of a risk.
“We’re comfortable with the conditions we have now, but it’s certainly something every time we put fire on the landscape, we’re watching,” Hughes said. “Obviously, if we get to a spot that we’re too droughty and prescribed fire is no longer safe to implement on the landscape, then we will back off that.”
Depending on the weather, the Forest Service plans to continue the prescribed burns through May on about 900 acres of land, including some in Windsor County.
