Southwestern canyon woodlands, for purposes of this paper, are vegetation types along canyon bottoms for mostly third and fourth order drainages whose streams may be permanent or intermittent. These include habitat types within blue spruce, white fir, ponderosa pine, narrowleaf cottonwood, Arizona cypress, and evergreen oak series (Layser and Schubert 1979). Nearly everywhere the canyon woodlands are subject to fire suppression and intense utilization such as commodity harvests, recreation, or development. Can studies in fire ecology from one canyon woodland at a certain location be extended or generalized to another location? At present I believe not. Fires in the ecological sense are part of the environment, and we have not yet been able to sufficiently particularize these canyon woodland environments in a classificatory sense.