Project Links
Fire Management Plan
Great Basin National Park » Fire Management Plan » Document List
The NPS is required to have Fire Management Plans (FMPs) for all units with burnable vegetation as defined by Reference Manual 18: Wildland Fire Management — National Park Service (NPS). Recent revisions to Department of the Interior and NPS fire management policy have resulted in changes to the requirements associated with FMPs, including new formats and templates. This, combined with rapid landscape‐level changes resulting from longer and more severe fire seasons and warmer and drier climatic conditions throughout parks of the Pacific West Region (PWR), has created the need for new Fire Management Plan, including the one at Great Basin National Park.
GRBA has had three primary FMPs since its creation in 1986; one from the early 1990's, a significant planning effort with Environmental Assessment (EA) in 2004, and a major revision in 2010 based on newer fuels and vegetation maps. Since then the park has experienced a number of large fires and widespread vegetation change. Fire Management Units (FMU) were originally based on Fire Regime Condition Class (FRCC) but landscape changes due to fire have changed the FMU classifications from those described in the current FMP.
Following the plan revision in 2010, GRBA lost its fire program and park Fire Management Officer (FMO). Overall fire management and FMO duties were transferred to Lake Mead NRA and initial attack response was transferred to the Ely District Bureau of Land Management (BLM). No significant fuels treatments were conducted in the park until the late 1990's with ~750 acres of pinyon/juniper fuels treated mechanically from 2004 to 2020. Pinyon/juniper treatments were conducted for both structure protection and ecological restoration (primarily to restore sage steppe ecosystems). Since 2012 ~100 acres of riparian and aspen areas were treated using conifer removal. The 2010 FMP identified ~24,000 acres of aspen that required management action to prevent their loss, but the park has been unable to implement these projects, partly due to deficiencies in the current Fire Management Plan. The park has also had two major interagency fires since 2010, the 2014 Black Fire and the 2016 Strawberry Fire (totaling 9,400 acres). Lack of clear management objectives and expectations in the GRBA FMP hampered fire management during both incidents.
An EA and new FMP will address native vegetation concerns and state clear objectives for fire management on the Great Basin National Park landscape. This includes revising Fire Management Units that better align with strategic objectives for fire management, and also assessing fuels and creating a 5‐year fuels treatment plan. This park provides an excellent opportunity to build on interagency research on resiliency and resistance concepts in Great Basin sagebrush ecosystems. The NPS Inventory and Monitoring Program has developed a data driven framework to test these concepts at a park scale, and Great Basin National Park staff are leaders in the service in working with science and science frameworks.
GRBA has had three primary FMPs since its creation in 1986; one from the early 1990's, a significant planning effort with Environmental Assessment (EA) in 2004, and a major revision in 2010 based on newer fuels and vegetation maps. Since then the park has experienced a number of large fires and widespread vegetation change. Fire Management Units (FMU) were originally based on Fire Regime Condition Class (FRCC) but landscape changes due to fire have changed the FMU classifications from those described in the current FMP.
Following the plan revision in 2010, GRBA lost its fire program and park Fire Management Officer (FMO). Overall fire management and FMO duties were transferred to Lake Mead NRA and initial attack response was transferred to the Ely District Bureau of Land Management (BLM). No significant fuels treatments were conducted in the park until the late 1990's with ~750 acres of pinyon/juniper fuels treated mechanically from 2004 to 2020. Pinyon/juniper treatments were conducted for both structure protection and ecological restoration (primarily to restore sage steppe ecosystems). Since 2012 ~100 acres of riparian and aspen areas were treated using conifer removal. The 2010 FMP identified ~24,000 acres of aspen that required management action to prevent their loss, but the park has been unable to implement these projects, partly due to deficiencies in the current Fire Management Plan. The park has also had two major interagency fires since 2010, the 2014 Black Fire and the 2016 Strawberry Fire (totaling 9,400 acres). Lack of clear management objectives and expectations in the GRBA FMP hampered fire management during both incidents.
An EA and new FMP will address native vegetation concerns and state clear objectives for fire management on the Great Basin National Park landscape. This includes revising Fire Management Units that better align with strategic objectives for fire management, and also assessing fuels and creating a 5‐year fuels treatment plan. This park provides an excellent opportunity to build on interagency research on resiliency and resistance concepts in Great Basin sagebrush ecosystems. The NPS Inventory and Monitoring Program has developed a data driven framework to test these concepts at a park scale, and Great Basin National Park staff are leaders in the service in working with science and science frameworks.