The Evolving Role of Wildland Fire in Virginia

Nature parks in our area are managed to support native plant communities, often the oak/hickory forest type. But some parks don’t much resemble the original landscapes because a key factor is missing: wildland fire. Hundreds of years ago, surface fires burned through many upland areas in Virginia at intervals of 30 years or less, opening landscapes by creating swaths of grassland with scattered trees (as shown below). Many of our upland forests resembled 1-acre Arlington Forest Park along Arlington Boulevard (as shown in the photo above), with its open fire-adapted vegetation, which is now maintained by hand rather than by fire.

Virginia rarely has fires ignited by lightning. What kept so many ancestral landscapes open was seasonal burning by American Indians for agriculture, hunting, travel, and trade. “They cannot travel but where the woods are burnt,” noted John Smith, a cofounder of Jamestown in 1607. American Indians used fire to clear bottomland for farming after killing the trees by girdling them (cutting away a ring around life-giving bark). They also coordinated “fire surrounds” to hunt deer, setting fires around large areas to drive deer herds toward hunters waiting with bows.

Many wooded uplands, maintained by seasonal fires in spring and fall, had widely spaced large old trees of oak, pine, and hickory, with an understory of fire-adapted grasses and other plants. An early Virginia explorer reported huge trees far enough apart for a “coach and fower [four] horses” to pass between. Grasses and other edible plants for deer, elk, and other game were plentiful in the open shade, and visibility was good, with big trees to hide behind while stalking game. On uplands near Little Falls on the Potomac River, an early explorer discovered a herd of animals “as big as kine,” old English for cows—evidently bison, a grassland indicator species. Bison were also reported in Shenandoah Valley and elsewhere in Virginia. 

Early settlers across the South adopted native burning practices, setting low fires in spring and fall to keep woodlands relatively open. Benefits included grasses, forbs, and other habitat for deer, quail, and other game as well as open areas with large mast trees (producing acorns, chestnuts, and hickory nuts) for pigs in fall. “Our pappies burned the woods,” they explained when federal and state officials tried to stop the fires in the 20^th century. The Smokey Bear campaign and hefty fines finally curtailed most wildland burning in Virginia.

Entrances to Arlington Forest Park (top), with its open dry-site trees and grasses, and adjacent Lubber Run Park (bottom), with its dense and self-sustaining forest vegetation. Photos by Dan Brown.

Without wildland fire—as the photos above suggest—most upland landscapes in Virginia changed from open woodland into dense and self-sustaining forests, free from disturbances except for occasional windthrow. By the 1990s, officials had recognized the need to restore fire to some landscapes for biodiversity, both to improve hunting and to keep fire-adapted species from dying out. Prescribed fires (deliberately set and managed for burning a specific area in spring or fall) are now used on some public lands in the Blue Ridge, Great Dismal Swamp, and elsewhere in Virginia.

As climates change and forests become more dense and flammable, wildfires and fire danger warnings during drought have increased across the United States, especially in the “wildland/urban interface”—what fire managers call the WUI (pronounced WOO-ee). The WUI is where homes commingle with wildland vegetation or where suburban and exurban communities adjoin sizable wildland areas. Arlington communities qualify as WUI where they border on public parklands, with their dense and potentially flammable vegetation. Virginia’s humid climate usually renders the fire danger negligible, and wildfires in our area are rare. As of last November 1, the Virginia Department of Forestry had reported less than 10,000 acres burned by wildfires statewide in 2025. That compared to almost 4.7 million acres burned nationwide as of October 10—roughly 470 times more than in Virginia alone. Virginia’s share of the national fire load is miniscule.

But seasonal warnings of high fire danger have been issued for Arlington and nearby areas in recent years (most recently last fall), and small fires have burned within living memory in Lubber Run Park in Arlington, Dora Kelley Nature Park in Alexandria, and elsewhere in our area. Moreover, climates are changing worldwide in response to greenhouse gas buildups in the atmosphere. Unprecedented wildfire disasters within the last decade have devastated communities like Paradise in California and Lahaina in Hawaii, taking hundreds of lives, destroying thousands of homes, and all but wiping out entire towns.

Accordingly, the Virginia Department of Forestry urges homeowners in the WUI to protect their properties from wildfire by keeping at least 30 feet of space from the house free from any forest or other wildland vegetation; keeping at least 5 feet of space from the house free from combustible materials of any kind; pruning branches from trees and shrubs to at least 6 feet from the ground; using fire-resistant materials for porches, fences, and other attachments to the house; and more. You can find a summary of the department’s fire safety recommendations here and a summary of its fire-safe building recommendations here.  

The article is by Hutch Brown, who edited the U.S. Forest Service’s wildland fire journal, wrote dozens of fire-related articles and public speeches, and interacted with many wildland fire scientists and managers in the course of his Forest Service career.