An Equipment Collection for the Wildland Firefighters of the PNW

Abstract

Forest fires have always been one of nature’s management tools for maintaining biodiversity across wild forests (University of Washington News, 2020). Through this burning process the heat of the fire burns away all of the vegetation and organic matter on the surface of the soil, which makes some nutrients more readily available to the soil (Minas, 2019). Although forest fire occurrences are not new, studies show that recent fires are more intense and burn the same areas in quick succession compared to historical patterns (Cascade Forest Conservancy, 2020). Over the past 10 years, there has been an average of 64,100 wildfires annually burning over 6.8 million acres in the United States alone (Congressional Research Service, 2020). There are several factors that contributed to the record-breaking fires that we are experiencing today. Some of these factors include: the urbanization of forest areas, the replacement of old-growth forest trees with overgrown homogeneous, single-species strands of trees, as well as the warm and dry weather condition attributed to climate change (Cascade Forest Conservancy, 2020).