Starting Small, Learning Big: Building a Path for Prescribed Fire on Private Lands
How do we make prescribed fire more feasible across private lands in Northern Colorado?
That was the question forest and fire managers set out to answer during a recent two-day workshop hosted by the Northern Colorado Fireshed Collaborative in the Poudre River Watershed with the Fire Learning Network (FLN).
The group came away with a goal that may sound small: successfully broadcast burn 0.5 acres of private land by 2028. While intentionally small, this first burn will help partners work through the practical steps of collaboratively implementing prescribed fire on private lands.
Why Private Lands Matter
The NoCo Fireshed landscape is roughly split between federally managed lands and lands under state, county, local, and private ownership. Creating healthier, more resilient forests across this landscape means treatments can't stop at property or jurisdictional boundaries.
Map shpws ownership distribution across Fireshed landscape.
This is especially important within the NoCo Fireshed's Priority Ribbon, where partners are working to strategically align forest treatments across ownerships to create more contiguous areas of resilient forest.
While prescribed fire is increasingly being used as a management tool on public lands, implementing broadcast burns on private lands can present a different set of challenges. Planning, permitting, capacity, liability, landowner coordination, site preparation, and access to qualified fire practitioners can all affect whether a project is ready for prescribed fire.
Successfully burning even a small private parcel can help partners better understand those barriers—and, more importantly, how to overcome them together.
Two Days of Learning and Planning
Previous proactive forest management work completed by Larimer Conservation District.
The workshop brought forest and fire managers together for two days of knowledge sharing, peer-to-peer learning, and collaborative planning.
During the classroom portion, participants worked through the steps necessary to move a private-land forest management project toward prescribed fire. Conversations explored questions such as:
What needs to be incorporated into a forest management plan if prescribed fire is the desired end state?
What conditions are fire managers looking for before they can safely and effectively put fire on the ground?
Partners also began developing shared goals, milestones, and a timeline for moving from forest management planning to an eventual broadcast burn. By bringing forestry and fire practitioners into the same room early in the process, the group could better understand how decisions made during initial forest treatments can either support—or complicate—the future use of prescribed fire.
On the second day, participants took those conversations into the field, visiting a potential burn site near the northeastern boundary of the Priority Ribbon. Walking the site together gave forestry and fire practitioners an opportunity to discuss conditions on the ground and consider what work would be needed to prepare the property for a future burn.
Creating a Model Others Can Learn From
Reaching the 0.5-acre goal will be an accomplishment, but the larger measure of success will be what partners learn along the way.
The process can help identify where coordination is needed, what resources private landowners and managers need, and how partners can better plan forest treatments today with prescribed fire in mind for the future.
Ultimately, the hope is that lessons from this project can be replicated by other watersheds and partners across the NoCo Fireshed, making it easier to use prescribed fire across ownership boundaries and build more connected, landscape-scale treatments.
A big thank you to the Larimer Conservation District for being an inspiration and driving force behind advancing private-land broadcast burning, and to theFire Learning Network for bringing partners together and planning this workshop.
Half an acre is a small place to start. But if it helps establish a pathway for partners to collaboratively plan and implement prescribed fire on private lands, its impact could extend far beyond the initial burn boundary.