black maple
Acer nigrum
A genus split is not a placement verdict.
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Black maple has a moderately Firewise rating, but the evidence does not support a simple claim that it is fire resistant.
The USDA Forest Service’s Northeastern Area and state Firewise programs rate it as moderately Firewise. Their scale places that category below Firewise and above At Risk and Not Firewise, so the qualification matters when choosing a tree.
A laboratory result adds a different kind of information. In Shi and Chew’s 2013 experiment, dead, predried black maple wood took 87 seconds to begin flaming in a calorimeter under external heat. That measures how long the prepared wood took to ignite under the test conditions. It does not give a homeowner a countdown for how long a living black maple would withstand a wildfire.
FLAMITS, the plant flammability database published through Dryad and Global Ecology and Biogeography, preserves the measurement without applying a common pass-or-fail threshold across different kinds of tests. The ignition time therefore cannot be translated into a fire-resistant rating or used to strengthen the planting guide’s judgment. For someone considering black maple near a home, the useful conclusion remains modest: the planting guidance is moderately favorable, and the wood test describes ignition under a particular laboratory exposure.
- Form
- tree
- Mature height
- ~50 ft
- Light
- Full sun
- Water need
- moderate
- Rated in
- Global; eastern US
