Fire Women Who Rock – Amanda Rau – Episode 41

We loved interviewing Amanda, in her episode we talked about fire science and the roll Smokey the bear plays.

Amanda Rau started working in wildland fire management as a member of a 20-person handcrew based in Springfield, Oregon in 1999. In 2001, after finishing her undergraduate degree in Philosophy at the University of Oregon, she began to seriously pursue a career fire management, working on interagency hotshot crews, handcrews, and engines based in Oregon, Montana, and California; as a fuels technician on the Deschutes National Forest; and assistant fire management officer in fuels management on the Ochoco National Forest and Crooked River National Grassland. Over the years, her wildland fire assignments have taken her from the longleaf pines of Florida to the prairies of Puget Sound. She studied Natural Resources at Oregon State University and completed a Masters in Natural Resources, Fire Ecology, and Management at the University of Idaho in 2012. That same year, she co-founded the Oregon Prescribed Fire Council, for which she serves as chair. Amanda has since worked for the Prineville Bureau of Land Management as a natural resource specialist coordinating post-fire emergency stabilization and rehabilitation and as invasives program manager for the Deschutes and Ochoco National Forests and Crooked River National Grassland. In 2015, she accepted a position as fire manager for The Nature Conservancy in Oregon and Washington. Amanda’s family originally settled in Oregon’s Willamette Valley in the late 1800’s, where they continue to manage a 672 acre small woodland where she works with her family harvesting timber. The roots of her passion for conservation and sustainable forest management in Oregon run deep.