Fire Management

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service manages fire to conserve, protect, and enhance fish, wildlife, and plants and their habitats, while first ensuring human safety and then protection of our facilities and neighboring communities. We continue to use prescribed fire and other management tools to maintain and restore natural ecosystems on Federal lands while reducing the risk of catastrophic wildfire. 

Management of wildland fire on our lands has expanded in scope in recent years. Factors such as continued development near our lands, newly acquired urban refuges, and climate change make our fire management responsibilities increasingly complex.

We develop Fire Management Plans (FMPs) for all Service lands with burnable vegetation. The FMPs are developed and maintained for refuges as part of the Comprehensive Conservation Planning (CCP) process. Specific plans help implement the objectives of the FMPs. For example, detailed burn plans are required whenever prescribed fire is used.

Fire management requires technical expertise in fire suppression, prescribed burning, and fire ecology. A physically arduous and dangerous natural resource profession, wildland fire management involves a combination of hazardous fuel management, firefighting, and fire use. Our staff includes approximately 600 full-time and more than 200 temporary and seasonal fire employees, along with 2,000 people in the Incident Qualification Certification System (IQCS) supporting the fire program and assisting in emergency responses throughout the world.

Our fire management program also provides fire and fuels management assistance to cooperating Federal, State, and local agencies. The FWS Director is a member of the Wildland Fire Leadership Council, providing leadership guidance and oversight of the National Fire Plan and Federal wildland fire policy. Our fire management national office is based at the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) in Boise, ID. NIFC provides an excellent location for coordinating and communicating with other fire management organizations. 

Did You Know?

• An average of 500 wildfires burn more than 260,000 acres each year on Service lands. The Service also burns about 300,000 acres a year using prescribed fire.
• More than 50 percent of Service lands in the continental United States. (and more than 90 percent in Alaska) include fire-adapted ecosystems with vegetation dependent on periodic fire.
• We manage 75 million burnable acres, including 24 million acres of forest/brushland and 4 million acres of grassland.
• We protect more than 700 communities and wildland-urban interface areas near refuges and other Service lands.

Fire Management Coordinators:

Region	Telephone	Fax
Region 1	503/231-6147	503/231-2354
Region 2	505/248-6474	505/248-6475
Region 3	612/713-5366	612/713-5286
Region 4	404/679-7191	404/679-7272
Region 5	757/986-3409	757/986-3932
Region 6	303/236-8125	303/236-4792
Region 7	907/786-3497	907/786-3932
Region 8	916/414-6501	916/414-6486
Region 9 - WO	208/387-5583	208/387-5668