White Pines & fire

[Troll]

This is a two part question regarding management in White Pines:

1: Can prescribed burning be used to help reduce the fuel loads in the understory of an area that is predominantly composed of White Pine ?

2: How well does White Pine respond to fire?

[fireman452]

White pine can be burned by very experienced burners under very exacting prescriptions. I have seen pictures in a seed orchard where a burn was conducted to control white pine blister rust, and the instructions were not carried out exactly right - there was some mortality. White pine has a very thin bark that does not take much to kill the tree so it best to ONLY use someone who has done this before or is very expereienced.

[Troll]

What kind of fuel load was present at the burn you mention? Currently I am looking at something with moderate litter load with grass and shrub components where the fuel bed is about 2 to 3 feet.

I understand that the need is to keep the spread rate and flame length low, so we are looking at a prescription with a moderate RH and lower temps. We are looking at a RH min ~25, or would you suggest higher? Additionally we are looking at doing this in the late fall or early spring so we can keep the temperature in the lower range.

We are in a unique situation with two units one very small (~20 acres) one large (~250 acres). The smaller unit will be our test site, and the larger one is the unit we want to keep.

[Alex Blog]

I agree. White pine is a dangerous tree. We have many of those in Spain and one colleague of mine was sadly killed while trying to estinguish a fire in this type of forrest.

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