Last updated: August 29, 2025
Article
The Big Benefits of Bringing Back Prescribed Fire
On hold since 2022, controlled burns have returned to Cape Cod National Seashore. Controlled burns reduce fuels to prevent catastrophic wildfires while preserving natural and cultural features in our national parks.
About this article
This article was originally published in the "Picture This" section of Park Science magazine, Volume 39, Number 2, Summer 2025 (August 29, 2025).
NPS / Katy Perrault
Wildland fire can be intimidating, especially when park resources and communities are intermingled. But removing fuels like invasive grasses can “starve” future wildfires, preventing them from becoming catastrophic. One way to do this is to use deliberately ignited and controlled burns, called prescribed burns. Prescribed burns have long been a part of Cape Cod National Seashore’s, and New England’s, history. But after the seashore’s previous fire manager retired in 2022, they’ve been absent from the park.
Prescribed burns returned to the park in spring 2025. They were the product of a collaboration across parks, regions, and partners. Long before a prescribed fire begins, fire managers create a burn plan based on scientific research of fire ecology. The plan uses a detailed study of the site’s topography and vegetation to set parameters (prescriptions) for a safe and effective burn.
On the day of the burn, fire managers monitor environmental conditions and the fire’s spread. You can see a burn crew in action in this photo during the 2025 prescribed burn in Cape Cod National Seashore’s Fort Hill area. This burn helped maintain the area’s cultural landscape while also reducing fuel loads and benefiting the ecosystem.
Fort Hill is home to the 1860s house of Captain Edward Penniman and his family, who used the surrounding land for agriculture. The Cultural Landscape Report for Fort Hill recommended prescribed burns along with mowing to maintain the area similarly to how it would have appeared (the historic viewshed) when the Pennimans farmed the land. Among other benefits, prescribed fire here also helps to maintain native plant biodiversity in the park’s rare, at-risk, coastal sandplain grasslands.
The 2025 Fort Hill burn served as a training exercise for a multidisciplinary team of staff from three parks, the regions, the state, and partner organizations. Sharing the wildfire-mitigation and other benefits of prescribed burns across departments and jurisdictions helps everyone. Wildland fires, after all, know no borders except the ones we set to manage them.
About the author
Katy Perrault is a former Scientists in Parks science communication assistant with Cape Cod National Seashore. Photo: NPS / Katy Perrault.
Cite this article
Katy Perrault. 2025. "The Big Benefits of Bringing Back Prescribed Fire." Park Science 39 (2). August 29, 2025. https://nps.gov/articles/000/psv39n2_the-big-benefits-of-bringing-back-prescribed-fire.htm