Key Points

• A century of fire suppression has led to dense forest conditions that require proactive fire management strategies such as prescribed fire (Quinton, 2019).

• Prescribed fire is underutilized by land managers due to many barriers (Schultz et. al, 2019) including resource-related, regulations-related, and risk-related barriers (Miller et al., 2020).

• Policy improvements can reduce the impact of these barriers (Miller et al., 2020).

• There are five main categories for recommendations to reduce policy barriers: resource-related, regulations-related, risk-related, educational, and environmental.

• The government and land managers can work together to influence these changes in order to increase implementation of prescribed fires (Miller, et al. 2020).

• Public education and scientific rationale can lead to location-specific fire management. There is no one right answer for all landscapes (Shultz et al., 2018).