Management Transcript

 

There's a general sense from the public that all fire is bad, but in fact that's not the case. In some parts of the world you need fire to maintain the ecosystem, to stop shrubs from coming in, keeping the grass there, and providing new food for animals. And so there's good fire and there's bad fire. What the fire management community does is try to minimize the bad fire and maximize the good fire. In some cases if you stop fires completely and you leave the vegetation to come back, when eventually it does burn you'll have catastrophic fires such as the one that we had in Yellowstone Park. In most of these natural systems fire is a natural phenomena which occurs on a certain frequency. And I think one of the things that we're doing with the satellite data is looking at the return frequency of fire to try and get a better understanding of the sequence of fire and how often it returns.