Cultural burning
Working with tribal practitioners to document prescribed cultural fire, its outcomes, and the regulatory barriers it still faces.
Program
Land Stewardship
Forest management grounded in science and Indigenous knowledge: cultural burning, ecological thinning, habitat restoration.
Defining metric
Fire-adapted landscapes need active management. This program documents which treatments work, where they have been applied, and what it costs to keep them going.
What we do
Ecological thinning
Treatment records matched to subsequent burn behavior, so effectiveness can be measured rather than asserted.
Habitat restoration
Post-fire recovery on public land: what was replanted, what returned, and what the monitoring shows.
Treatment funding
Where fuels-reduction dollars are obligated, and how that maps against the districts carrying the most burn acreage.
Research in this program
All Land Stewardship researchStories & analysis
All stories
Analysis
From the Vault MacCleery: April 29, 2010
A paper from the archive on how indigenous peoples shaped the pre-Columbian Southeast, and what centuries of widespread burning mean for the rare species and ecosystems found there today.
Analysis
Environmentalitis and the Cost of Forest Litigation in Western Oregon
A deep-dive into how environmental litigation reshaped federal forest policy, ended salvage logging, and helped fuel recurring wildfire disasters in western Oregon.
Analysis
Stewardship Without Access: Why Deferred Maintenance Is Silently Shrinking Public Lands
Brent Oliver argues that true Forest Service stewardship must include access, maintenance, and disability rights—not just land protection—while highlighting the growing deferred maintenance crisis.
Next step
Seven years of treatment records, normalized and mapped to congressional district.
Browse the research