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2006 Harold Biswell Award
ROBERT W. MUTCH
Bob Mutch obtained his B.A. degree in Biology and English from Albion College in Michigan in 1956, and received Albion’s Distinguished Alumni Award in 2004. He received his M.S.F. degree in Fire Science from the University of Montana, 1959. He has been recognized as a national and international leader in fire ecology and fire management for more than forty years.
Bob began his career as a smoke jumper and worked for the USFS for 38 years, with his career split between fire research at the Forest Fire Lab in Missoula and fire management operations at both the national forest and regional levels. During his career he has published over 60 technical and popular articles on wildland fuel flammability, fire behavior, prescribed fire management, wilderness fire management, fire safety, and international disaster assistance.
As a researcher, Bob developed an important hypothesis regarding the interaction between wildland fires and ecosystems that was published in Ecology in 1970. Simply stated, he proposed that “fire-dependent plant communities burn more readily than nonfire-dependent communities because natural selection has favored development of characteristics that make them more flammable.” This concept extended the commonly accepted fire climate-fuel moisture basis of wildland fire occurrence to consider inherent flammable properties as well. For over thirty years, Bob’s hypothesis has been discussed, debated, challenged, and modified, but never repudiated.
Bob was among the first to recognize the ecological impacts of excluding fire from forest ecosystems for more than 80 years. He realized that fire is a critical natural process in ecosystems and as a result he played a key role in establishing the USFS's first prescribed natural fire management program in a wilderness - the 1972 White Cap Fire Management Plan in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness. Bob helped transfer the results of this pioneering plan to other USFS regions and to the National Park Service and helped lead post-fire studies of the impacts of prescribed natural fires on vegetation and fuels.
Since "retiring" in 1994, Bob has served as an international fire management consultant with the United Nations Forestry and Agricultural Organization and the World Bank. With a German co-author, he prepared a 500-page report for FAO titled A Global Assessment of Forest Fires: 1990-2000 that describes the fire situation throughout the world. Bob also has repeatedly worked on overhead management teams during hot fire seasons. In the summer of 2003 he was recruited to work on the Northwest Montana Area Command. He has become very interested in fire safety and better strategies for protecting human life and property from wildland fire.
Throughout his career, Bob has been involved in communicating the significant ecological role of fire in various ecosystems, with strong emphasis on the western U.S. He did so in ways that help managers and the public to better understand fire's role and to make good decisions about how to manage fire in forest, brush, and grassland ecosystems. Some of his greatest career contributions have been his extremely effective presentations at workshops, conferences, seminars, university classes, and training centers as well as his involvement in producing public education materials. His passion for fire and communicating to people about it never seem to wane. |
