Wildfire Resource Management Stories

In 2023, interns collected and processed hundreds of thousands of native plant seeds at Lava Beds National Monument. In 2024, 4000 propagated native plants were planted at three sites to restore the land after the Caldwell and Antelope fires.

In 2024, fire management staff from the National Park Service’s Great Lakes Fire Management Zone, based at Indiana Dunes National Park, completed prescribed fires and fuels management projects across six different parks in four states using Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding. Projects consisted of prescribed fires, mechanical fuels reduction, pile burning, ecological surveys, and natural resource monitoring.

In August 2023, two National Park Service Resource Advisors worked with a local crew to protect a historic cemetery in Nenana, Alaska from fire.

Using $2.6 million from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) Burned Area Rehabilitation (BAR) funds, the National Park Service (NPS) has begun habitat restoration in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks (SEKI) in areas outside of designated wilderness, and is in the planning stages for restoration within designated wilderness. This work is taking place in areas that burned during the 2020 SQF Complex and the 2021 KNP Complex.

Over the past three years, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Cherokee National Forest, and the Appalachian-Piedmont-Coastal Fire Management Zone (APC Zone) have worked together to do fuels treatments. This project is one of a suite of management actions used at Great Smoky Mountains to preserve the cultural landscape and ecological character of this unique area in the park.

Within large tracts of Alaska’s federal lands designated as national parks, preserves, and monuments are allotments of ancestral lands of Alaska Native People. Many of these areas are located within stretches of NPS-administered lands. NPS fire personnel manages the possibility of fire and the land to allow fire to play its natural role on the landscape without risking park infrastructure or cultural resources.

Fire effects monitoring crews (FEMO) from North Cascades National Park, Grand Teton National Park, and the Fremont-Winema National Forest assisted Yosemite National Park fire crews in measuring post-fire effects of the 2020 Blue Jay and 2021 Lukens fire footprints. Crews measured post-fire effects to ensure that the park is meeting fire management objectives. Data will assist in streamlining approaches to measure reductions in fuel loading and other resource objectives.

Most documentation of the panoramic lookout photos project, which began about 1930 to document areas seen from the lookout system, comes from the US Forest Service. The NPS project began in 1934. Lester Moe worked for the Forest Service taking photos in 1933 and 1934, and later worked for NPS. Several innovations came about from this project: the Osborne photo-recording transit and “special emulsion infra-red sensitive film” not affected by smoke and haze.

The tables on this page list parks and points within parks where a panoramic lookout photo was taken in the 1930s. Data are included for lookout station, azimuth sector, photo serial number, type of film, date of original photograph, photographer, and retake date, where available.

Retake photography allows a viewer to compare how identifying landscape features change over time. There are many uses for these panoramic lookout photographs still today: assisting lookouts and park managers to accurately locate forest fires; identifying vegetation patterns; identifying landscape features; repeat photography to observe changes; and comparing infrared and panchromatic films, which can reveal changes in vegetation health and soil moisture, among other things.