Fire use can include:

• Traditional uses of fire by local rural people that are either needed to maintain livelihoods or have persisted even as the social/economic context of the region has changed;
  
• The role that people have played in creating, maintaining or changing desired ecosystems and their components;
  
• The use of fire to limit fire’s spread into areas where it is not wanted, either by creating barriers to spread or reducing fire intensity to facilitate suppression activities; and
  
• Managed burning to restore and maintain desired ecosystem states or to favor desired ecosystem products and services. 
  

Traditional Fire Uses and Needs
In fire-dependent ecosystems, people invariably have played a longstanding role in creating, maintaining, or changing ecosystems that are desired today for conservation purposes.

Recognizing and understanding the important role that human fire use has played in any given landscape is an important component of Integrated Ecological Fire Management. Current burning practices may or may not be at odds with conservation goals. In either case, rather than working against those uses, in many cases it is more practical to modify current fire use, either to mitigate negative impacts or to actually employ existing fire use to reach fire management objectives and conservation goals. For example, burns set by local communities for non-conservation purposes can be strategically placed or timed to contain the spread of wildfires or to prevent fires from burning into forested reserves.

Ecological Prescribed Fire and Wildland Fire Use
Prescribed fire is the application of carefully controlled burns under defined fuel and weather conditions to accomplish specific land management or ecological objectives. The objectives usually involve both desired fire effects of each burn, plus a long-term trend or goal for the continuous application of fire over time, i.e. a fire regime goal.

Wildland fire use is the management of unplanned wildfire to obtain beneficial outcomes that help achieve management goals. It takes advantage of the ecological work that an unplanned fire will accomplish. The level of management of unplanned fires may range from observation and monitoring within predetermined fire size limits, to more aggressive containment within specified zones.

Prescribed fire has its place in both fire-maintained and fire-sensitive ecosystems. In fire-maintained ecosystems, it can be used as a restoration tool, replacing or augmenting an appropriate fire regime in areas where some or all free-ranging wildfires can no longer be tolerated. Prescribed fire can also be used to create fuel breaks to facilitate the control of unwanted fires or to corral unplanned fires that are being managed for resource or conservation benefits.

In fire-sensitive ecosystems, prescribed burning is often needed to create fire breaks at reserve boundaries and around zones of high risk of damage if a fire should occur. Farmers and livestock herders and ranchers can use prescribed fire techniques to keep their fires from escaping into fire-sensitive vegetation.

Effective prescribed burning requires intensive training and an understanding of fire behavior, fuels, weather, topography and fire effects, along with considerable experience. Technical difficulty and level of training will vary with the complexity and size of the area being burned and the associated risks to the surrounding area should the fire escape control. Careful planning and contingencies are essential, as is the capacity to suppress an escaped fire.