Fuels Technician

Site

Location:

Shawnee National Forest/USDA Forest Service

• Start Date: 08/03/2026
• End Date: 06/25/2027

The mission of the Forest Service at Shawnee is to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the nation’s forests and grasslands to meet the needs of present and future generations.

The Shawnee National Forest (SHF) is a unit within the Forest Service that encompasses about 289,000 acres in 10 southern Illinois counties and sits between the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. The lands that make up the Shawnee were acquired piecemeal, resulting in an extremely patchy ownership pattern. Working with our neighbors and partners is therefore a must in this landscape.

The fire management program of the Shawnee National Forest is charged with providing a safe, efficient, and cost effective organization to provide for public and firefighter safety, protect property and resource values, reduce wildfire risk to rural communities, and use fire to maintain desired vegetative communities and ecosystems. Vegetation in most of the SHF evolved with frequent fire. A lack of fire in the past 90 years has resulted in dramatic changes to the landscape.

To reduce risk and meet our vegetation and fuels objectives, we need to return fire to the ecosystem in a major way. The SHF currently averages about 10,000 acres of prescribed fire per year. To meet our ecological and fire protection needs, this should probably be more than 20,000 acres per year.

To meet these goals, we need to do three things.

• We need to grow out ability to prep burn units, on both public and private land and get them burned.
• Given our ownership pattern, we need to work extensively with partners and landowners to burn across ownership boundaries. We are currently working the Illinois Department of Natural Resources (IDNR) and Shawnee Resource Conservation and Development (RCD) to outreach to landowners and plan, prepare, and implement cross-boundary prescribed fire/burning.
• We need to grow our social license for prescribed fire. We have decent public and partner support and acceptance for prescribed fire, but it is not universal, and our public affairs staff is limited. Further, we seek to engage our removed tribes in a more robust way regarding fire and fuels management, including improved understanding of the others values, priorities, and concerns.
• We are working on several initiatives to enhance our prescribed fire, fuels and risk reduction programs, including our cross-boundary program. A document authorizing the use of prescribed fire Forest-wide is expected to be signed late summer 2026. This should allow us to develop cross-boundary burns much faster, but will also increase the demand for meeting with adjoining landowners and increase the demand for burn unit preparation.
• A second initiative is developing a comprehensive and potentially inter-agency monitoring plan and mobile applications to document fire effects to ensure we are meeting objectives.
• A third initiative is revising, enhancing, and increasing our print, visual, and in-person communications around prescribed fire to build and maintain our social license for burning. A fourth initiative is supporting our counties in implementing or developing their Community Wildfire Protection Plans (CWPPs) and fire prevention and mitigation programs.
• The IP serving with the SHF will provide key support to these efforts that we are struggling to achieve with our staff alone. Corps member will assist with these initiatives, depending on their interests and skills.

• Preparation and implementation of burn units. Prep would include posting signs, constructing fire line(s), cutting or excluding snags and jackpots along the line, structure preparation or defensible space clearing, setting up portable water tanks, etc. Implementation of burns would occur under the leadership of Forest Service burn bosses.
• In-person landowner outreach regarding the benefits and need for prescribed fire, fire hazard assessments, and techniques to reduce risk to homes and communities. The IP would also help scout burn units to determine proper fireline locations, and…