Fire Management on Isle Royale: Wilderness, Fire Units and Burning

Watching a fire lets crews make informed decisions. NPS.

Fire management is planning, preventing and fighting wildfires to protect people, property and natural resources — and can include prescribed fire to meet land-management goals. Isle Royale manages both natural and human-caused fires.

Fire in a wilderness

Wildfire can change landscapes, and often does — but it is also a natural disturbance agent, sometimes a necessary and beneficial part of an ecosystem. That makes managing it complex.

About 99 percent of the park is federally designated wilderness. That shapes everything from the tools firefighters use to the suppression tactics they choose, and the park's Fire Management Plan is written to wilderness rules.

Hoses and sprinklers can create defensible space around structures. NPS.

The Fire Management Plan

The park's Fire Management Plan (PDF) aims to:

• prevent fire-related injuries to staff and the public, through information and closing areas when needed;
• let fire play its role as a natural disturbance agent, as far as possible;
• use suitable fuel management to cut fire risk where wildland meets NPS infrastructure or inholdings and life leases.

Firefighter safety comes first in every fire management activity. NPS.

Two fire management units

If a fire in the Wildland Fire unit threatens to cross into a Suppression unit, crews build firelines and create defensible space around developed areas.

Most of the island is in the Wildland Fire unit. NPS.

Prescribed fire

Prescribed fire is fire set on purpose by experts, under specified weather, to restore fire-dependent ecosystems. The plan authorizes it, but the park has used it rarely — its use could grow if research and monitoring show a need.

Every maintenance burn is closely watched. NPS / Marcus Tanskanen.

Maintenance burning

Separate from prescribed fire, maintenance burning is a fuel management tool. Hazardous fuels — flammable, woody material — are gathered at set sites and burned in piles to cut fuel near facilities and for resource management. Pile burns may happen through the summer at Mott Island, Rock Harbor and Windigo.

More: fire on Isle Royale — fire ecology, fire history, fire towers, glossary · NPS Wildland Fire Strategic Plan

Sources

Based on "Fire Management on Isle Royale," Isle Royale National Park, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.