Many thanks to John for this link to a Seattle Times story on John Marshall, who is taking photographs from the same areas as the Osborne photos of the 1930s. Very cool photos and it’s not paywalled. If you want to learn more about the Osborne photos, Bob Zybach provided a link to a project trying to provide comparison photos over a broad area. The Osborne photos from some areas you may be familiar with are posted on the site. This seems like a useful effort, and it sounds like lots of different folks are funding different parts. I’m surprised someone with funds doesn’t take this on more broadly and coordinate. Here are some quotes from the story:
His images, taken from the same vantage points nearly a century later, illustrate the consequences of relentless fire suppression. Across the state, Marshall has documented the transformation of landscapes historically characterized by patchworks of saplings, mature trees, shrubs and meadows — all shaped by frequent, small fires. Today, clearings have been swallowed up. Habitat diversity has diminished, and ridges and hillsides are thick with timber. Many forests, especially in Central and Eastern Washington, are stressed by overcrowding, heat, drought and insect infestations — and primed for megafires.
It’s not a new story, but the pictures tell it in a way words can’t.
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Forest Service ecologist Paul Hessburg, who helped recruit Marshall to the panorama project in 2010, has used the before-and-after images in scores of scientific publications and nearly 200 presentations to peers and the public, making the case for allowing some fires to burn and deliberately setting others to reduce the risk of massive blazes.
“These visuals are so powerful because they show the scale,” says Hessburg, who’s based at the Pacific Northwest Research Station in Wenatchee. “People come up to me after talks and say, ‘You know, I wouldn’t have believed it until I saw it — but there it is.’ ”
The panoramas also helped Hessburg bust a long-standing myth that high-elevation forests in the Northwest hadn’t burned frequently in the past. “John and I have been working together in different geographies to show people how, in 100 years or less, the forest has changed,” he says. “And it’s changed more than we could have even imagined until we had these pictures.”
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The agency recently launched a forest health initiative that includes tree-thinning and prescribed burns. “We’ve grown up with these dense, thick forests, so people naturally think that’s what a healthy forest looks like,” says Chuck Hersey, of DNR’s Forest Resilience Division. “But our fundamental forest health problem in Eastern Washington is that there’s too many trees.” Side-by-side images separated by nine decades make the case at a glance, showing the stark changes in the landscape.
One example is Squilchuck State Park near Wenatchee, where fire used to sweep through every dozen years or so before land managers started snuffing out every blaze. A detail shot from the 1934 Osborne panorama shows open meadows interspersed with clumps of mature, fire-resistant Ponderosa pine and sparser stands of firs and other species. In the image Marshall made in 2018, the area is blanketed with wall-to-wall trees. The pictures helped Washington State Parks explain its rationale for two recent thinning operations to lower the fire risk.
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In 1934, several patches across the landscape had recently burned, he explains. Some were ringed with shrubs and deciduous trees. Now, most of those areas are completely knitted in with conifers. But in other places, there seem to be more openings in the tree canopy today than 90 years ago.
“That’s due to insects and disease,” Marshall says. While fires clear out flammable material, infestations don’t. “It only adds to the fuel loads, which are just ginormous now.”
We might want to email the reporter and thank her.. “catch people doing something right”.. maybe FS folks remember the training we had on that..
Yesterday we were discussing environmental justice and residents of dry forests. Jon said “Beyond the formal environmental justice realm (which does not appear to include “rural communities in dry forests”), this is pretty much a matter of opinion, and not a very practical criterion.”
I ran across this article in Wildfire Today which raises other questions. In addition to Jon’s question, I think pre-climate change, some people were originally not sympathetic to dry forest inhabitants (they shouldn’t live there). Now that wildfire is thought to be a result of climate change, though, it seems like attention has been drawn to the fact that low income people also live here. Which I think we knew, but…
I don’t know about 90 percent of all people exposed.. maybe there is a map somewhere that shows it. Also how “exposed” is defined.
Around 90 percent of all people exposed to wildfires over the past 23 years lived in either California, Oregon, or Washington. Among those, researchers found a disproportionate number were poor, a racial minority, disabled, or over the age of 65.
A recent study examined the “social vulnerability” of the people exposed to wildfires over the last two decades. Social vulnerability describes how persons with certain social, economic, or demographic traits were more susceptible to harm from hazards including wildfires or other natural disasters.
From 2000 to 2021, the number of people in the western United States who lived in fire-affected areas increased by 185 percent, while structure losses from wildfires increased by 246 percent. The vulnerability of the people living there, however, isn’t well known despite these populations potentially never recovering after a disaster strikes.
Researchers asked whether highly vulnerable people were disproportionately exposed to wildfire, how vulnerability has changed over the past 20 years, whether population changes before a fire alter the vulnerability of the population, and whether social vulnerability of people exposed to fires was equal among states.
Each of the three West Coast states recorded disproportionate wildfire exposure of the socially vulnerable; Oregon and Washington had more than 40 percent of their exposed population being highly vulnerable while California had around 8 percent of of those exposed considered highly vulnerable. The most vulnerable populations were also those with low income, while age, minority status, and disability also affected populations’ ability to cope after wildfire.
The number of highly vulnerable people exposed to fire in the three states also increased by 249 percent over the past two decades. An increase in social vulnerability of populations in burned areas was the main contributor to increased exposure in California, while Oregon and Washington saw wildfires increasingly encroaching on vulnerable population areas.
“Our analysis highlights the need to increase understanding of the social characteristics that affect vulnerability, to inform effective mitigation and adaptation strategies,” the study said. “Particular attention to residents who are older, living with a disability, living in group quarters, and with limited English-speaking skills may be warranted, and cultural differences need to be addressed for effective policy development and response.”
Other research published earlier this year, The Path of Flames: Understanding and Responding to Fatal Wildfires, found unequal access and assistance could also play a role in who survives and who dies during catastrophic wildfires. In the study, researchers found that for many of the Paradise, California residents who died in the 2018 Camp Fire, the inability to evacuate on their own was a major factor in their deaths.
A gray wolf is seen in the Sequoia National Forest. Michelle Harris, Samantha Winiecki-Love, Ryan Slezak and Colibri Ecological Consulting/via the California Department of Fiash and WIldlife
The journey started on Wildfire Today.. this headline intrigued me..
A keystone species — an organism that helps define an entire ecosystem — is calling the fire area home again, 150 years after being hunted and driven out.
I became curious about what the current definition for a keystone species is. When I was with the FS I had to attend numerous presentations by wildlife researchers who all had rationales for why their species was a keystone species. It was kind of an interior joke to me .. how far would they go in rationalizing their “keystone-ness?”
It was interesting to see how folks like WEF and NRDC defined keystone species..according to WEF (the World Economic Forum, who knew that they were interested?) the gray wolf is a keystone species.
In short, keystone species enable other species to survive, occupying a key role in the ecosystem they are part of. Without them, their ecosystems would be dramatically different or even cease to exist.
I’ve been many places around the west before reintroduction and expansion of wolf populations, and thereafter. They don’t seem dramatically different to me. Maybe because “dramatically” has no scientific definition. Or because our state wildlife folks manage deer and elk populations such that they don’t need extra carnivores to keep the populations down (and some populations of deer and elk are apparently having trouble with numbers even without wolves). If you’re going to argue “it’s better with wolves”, I need more than “that’s the way it used to be.” Because nothing else in our environment is exactly the way it used to be.
As a native Californian, I never thought of the Porterville area as “southern California.” I’d go for Central Calif, or the southern Sierra. And I’m not so sure the wildfires themselves drew them to that area. There are plenty of wildfire acres north of the Windy Fire.
“If you walk through a burned landscape with lots of dead trees, you’ll be surprised by the vibrant life which springs from the ashes,” says Andrew Stillman, an ecologist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
The female traveled about 200 miles from the nearest known wolf pack, scaling the mighty Sierra Nevada mountains.
Why did the wolves move so quickly into a burned landscape? When fires kill trees, more sunlight is able to reach the blackened soils; this stimulates dormant plants such as grasses to sprout. The nutritious grasses attract deer and other species, offering wolves a buffet.
I think the question is rather “why did the wolves go through so many other burned landscapes and settle on this one?”
The return of the predators has also led to some conflict with humans: McDarment and other reservation residents say wolves have killed their livestock.
But that link goes to a generic Sci Am article on wolves and livestock predation studies.
It looks like the California wolves were just news of the day bait for more generic statements by UBC ecologist, a senior scientist at Los Alamos, a UCLA ecologist, a Cornell bird ecologist, and a fire researcher at Natural Resources Canada. So what’s up with that?
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I then went looking for “livestock killed on the Tule Reservation” and ran across an article in the Guardian.
The Guardian, like many news organisations around the world, is working to find new ways to fund our journalism to ensure we can continue to produce quality, independent journalism in the public interest.
Increasing philanthropic support for our independent journalism helps fund impactful Guardian reporting on important topics such as modern-day slavery, women’s rights, climate change, migration and inequality.
But can they call themselves completely “independent” if they take others’ funds, when those others have definitive worldviews? Check out this link to “philanthropic partnerships”
The Guardian is different. We have no billionaire owner or shareholders to consider. Our journalism is produced to serve the public interest – not profit motives. And we avoid the trap that befalls much US media – the tendency, born of a desire to please all sides, to engage in false equivalence in the name of neutrality
They seem very certain of what they think is correct.. personally I’d prefer some humility. Anyway, back to the wolves.
The land on the reservation is high desert meets alpine, 55,000 acres of scrub and redwoods bordering Sequoia national forest.
Many of us live or have lived in the Sierra foothills.. we wouldn’t call it “high desert”; nor is the Sequoia National Forest “alpine” at that point. And it’s Giant Sequoia, not “redwoods.” A reporter could have easily found this excellent website on the reservation vegetation by the Tule River Tribe, which has all the details a person might want.
The fires brought another change: wolves.
After the blaze, the reservation became a perfect place for den sites and hunting. Wolves love open forests, too, and the reservation had plenty – plus beefy cows. In July, a gray wolf pack was spotted in nearby Sequoia national forest after a nearly 150-year absence in southern California.
If the fires brought the wolves, why did it take them two years to get there?
They need to hide, says Jordan Traverso, the communications lead for California’s department of fish and wildlife, because while many in California’s left-leaning cities cheered the wolves’ return, those living in and around them, like cattle ranchers, have little recourse if a wolf kills their livestock, which is why wolves are “so controversial”.
Just in case we didn’t know how the reporter feels about California (he is a Californian, if you go to his webpage you find that he writes on all kinds of topics):
That also explains why California is actually a progressive paradox: it is both an environmental bellwether that influences everything from emissions to endangered species policy, which boosts conservation, but it’s also filled with large-scale agriculture and industrial farming which can often pollute and destroy the land.
Actually I don’t think California has much of a say in endangered species policy, which I think the feds have pretty well sewn up.
Then there are several generic quotes from a Montanan on wolves.
Wolves are neither monster nor romantic symbol – and they rarely attack humans or livestock. When the government reintroduced 41 wolves to Yellowstone national park in 1995, ranchers in Montana and Wyoming were up in arms. Over the next eight years, wolves killed just 256 sheep and 41 cattle in those states (states with millions of livestock).
“Instead of decimating cows,” Wolke says, “wolves reduced elk numbers, so willow and aspen trees came back. So did birds and beavers, which improved wetlands.”
While no one knows how many cows have been killed here, wolves cause less than 4% of US cattle deaths.
I tried to look up sheep and cattle deaths and found that.. people disagree. I did find the USFWS says that there were 154 cattle deaths in 2016 in Wyoming alone. Of course, if you use the 8 years after reintroduction, there were probably fewer wolves on the landscape than the 377 they counted in Wyoming alone in 2016.
Impacts to livestock from wolves creates costs borne by livestock producers, including mortality from wolf predation and other indirect impacts. These costs are unevenly distributed and localized, with some producers suffering greater losses than others. Although wolf depredation is a small economic cost to the livestock industry as a whole, the impacts to individual producers can be substantial.
.7,12 For those impacted by wolf predation, the economic and emotional impacts can be substantial. Both direct and indirect losses could significantly affect the livelihood of individual ranchers operating on thin profit margins in volatile market
Anyway, back to the Guardian piece:
It seems wolves are all locals want to talk about. Fear is the central theme, says Greg King, the author of The Ghost Forest: Racists, Radicals, and Real Estate in the California Redwoods. “Ranchers fear for their livestock and humans fear for themselves. Fear is destructive. Maybe we can’t have it all.”
King is from Humboldt County.
And when locals get spooked, wolves often pay the price. Case in point – December 2018, when a northern California rancher saw a wolf feeding on a calf. Investigators determined the calf probably died of pneumonia, but that wolf was found dead on the side of a road, riddled with .22 caliber rounds. A rancher was arrested, but officers couldn’t prove that he pulled the trigger, so they let him go. That could happen here.
I’m not sure that once counts as “often.”
The LA Times says that the wolves reappeared in Giant Sequoia National Monument.
“Wolves rewild the landscape and that’s good not just for the wolves but for entire ecosystems,” said Amaroq Weiss, senior wolf advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity.
“California years ago laid out a welcome mat for wolves, and we can keep it there if we don’t get led astray by old fears and misconceptions,” she said.
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It’s interesting that Ms. Weiss’s background is in law and advocacy, and not ecology nor wildife.
In any case, gray wolves occupy a small part of their historic range. Scientists say a comprehensive recovery plan encouraging their return is crucial to returning ecological stability across thousands of square miles of still-wild habitat.
Among them was ecologist Chad Hanson, who, in an interview, said the wolf pack has become, of all things, the beneficiary of wildfires that jump-started new generations of nutritious grass and shrubs that attract deer they prey on.
“Higher ungulate abundance provides prey for wolves,” he said. “Logging reduces habitat for deer, adversely impacting endangered wolves.”
That kind of talk leaves some federal forest managers and timber industry advocates quietly seething.
But I thought scientists had given up on “ecological stability” as a concept? Maybe that was only ecologists or only some ecologists? Thousands of square miles of “still wild” habitat? Is the southern Sierra “still wild”? And Hansoniana also leaves many scientists “quietly seething.”
Could Hanson be the source of the strain in all this reporting of “fires attract wolves”?
So let’s look at the journalists involved Louis Sahagún of the LA Times; Adam Popescu an independent journalist (who wrote the Guardian and the Scientific American versions); and Hunter Bassler is a reporter in Saint Louis who writes for Wildfire Today. Which is not to criticize them, certainly most of us couldn’t cover the range of stories that they do in any meaningful way. As we said about climate science, they have to work with the systems they have. And currently, apparently outlets can’t afford to pay people to keep this kind of expertise in their newsrooms. The outlets that can afford it like E&E news, are not accessible to the average citizen nor many not-for-profits. And the folks who fund journalism have definite worldviews that they promote. It’s not a pretyy picture.
I don’t know if this one is particularly good but I needed a photo.
A friend has asked for examples of communities that have done exceptional work in becoming wildfire adapted and resilient. This would include all aspects of resilience, ignition reduction, structure and infrastructures design and hardening, fuel treatments/ mitigation, evacuation, and probably many things not on this list. Please comment below and provide links if possible.
Many thanks again to Kelly Martin for making herself available for a presentation on the Wildfire Commission Report last Friday! And thanks to all who attended and participated.
We had an interesting discussion afterwards, in which members of the group disagreed on some things (e.g. around the use of beneficial wildfire) and agreed on others (developing affordable housing for firefighters). One of my favorite moments was toward the end of the video, when Kelly talks about her passions for this work, and why she continues working on these issues in retirement. I’m sure she articulated how many of us feel and can’t express nearly as well.
I’m hoping the video will work for those who couldn’t attend. It’s posted here. Please comment below if it doesn’t work for you.
On today’s show, I welcome Kelly Martin to discuss the new Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission’s report to Congress, everything happening with the workforce, legislation, and beneficial fire.
The Presidential Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission was established in 2022. Kelly was one of 500 applicants who applied to voluntarily serve on this 50-member Commission. She was selected to fill the primary seat representing Wildland Firefighters.
Kelly’s 35-year federal career as a wildland firefighter provided invaluable technical and subject matter expertise to the Commission, ultimately obtaining unanimous consensus on comprehensive workforce reforms (see recommendations 84-103 in the Commission report).
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Comment Moderation- New Tab
I don’t get to read everyone’s comments, but I have noted a couple of requests for moderation. So I made another tab above labelled “Moderation Requests and Discussion” so I can find them. Please put all such comments there or a link to the moderation comments you’ve already made. I do want to respond but I want to be more or less consistent, and I want to be able to find them all. Thank you!
The Zoom will be held Friday, November 3 (this Friday) at 1PM Pacific, 2PM MT, and 4PM ET.
All are welcome to this first TSW Zoom! Email me at Sharon at forestpolicypub.com for the link. Kelly is a member of the Commission. Here’s her bio:
Kelly is the President of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing the public with information and education regarding much needed wildland fire workforce reforms. Her organization advocates on behalf of thousands of wildland firefighters.
She is also very active as a Burn Boss for The Nature Conservancy (TNC) mentoring and coaching other TNC employees and nonprofit organizations to help them become more skilled and proficient in applying “good fire” on the landscape.
After 35 years as a fulltime federal wildland firefighter, Kelly retired federal service in 2019 for an opportunity to pass her knowledge to the next generation through her volunteer work as a subcommittee chair of IAWF hosting “Ignite Talk” presentations and serving as the President of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters.
She is a Burn Boss; Fire Behavior Analyst; Operations Section Chief; and Operations Branch Director and served on Interagency Incident Management Teams for over 20 years. She has served as a Fire Management Officer for both the US Forest Service and the National Park Service in Moab, UT; Carson City, NV; Placerville, CA; and Yosemite, CA. She is a strong advocate and leader for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion promoting gender parity throughout the Wildland Fire Community. Her current work includes providing leadership for the Women-in-Fire Prescribed Fire Training Exchange (WTREX) and Indigenous Cultural burning Training Exchanges (TREX) events.
I happened to run across something that contradicts Bob Zybach’s repeated assertions that, “these fires have been clearly predicted by me and others because of USFS management policies and Wilderness designations and have zero to do with warming climate or drier fuels.” The Union of Concerned Scientists calculated the effect of warming climate and drier fuels on burned area, and the result from their peer-reviewed analysis is not “zero.”
Climate change is causing hotter, drier conditions that are also fueling these increasingly large and severe wildfires. In particular, vapor pressure deficit (VPD), a measure of atmospheric “thirst,” has emerged as a key way of tracking how climate change is amplifying wildfires because of its role in regulating water dynamics in ecosystems and, together with rising temperatures, contributing to increasing dryness (Box 1).
UCS used a combination of data and modeling to determine how much the carbon emissions associated with 88 major carbon producers (hereafter, the “big 88”) have historically contributed to increases in VPD and burned forest area across the western United States and southwestern Canada (see Methodology).
Across western North America, the area burned by forest fires increases exponentially as VPD increases, which means that relatively small changes in VPD result in large changes in burned forest area. The observed rise in VPD has enabled a steep increase in the forest area that has burned across the region since the mid-1980s. Since 1986,1 a cumulative 53.0 million acres of forest area has burned across western North America as VPD has risen. Without emissions tied to the big 88, the rise in VPD would have been much smaller, and 33.3 million acres (IQR 27.7 million–38.5 million) would have burned (Figure 4). That means that 37 percent (IQR 26–47 percent) of the cumulative burned forest area from 1986 to 2021 is attributable to emissions from the big 88. This represents nearly 19.8 million acres of burned forest area, or an area roughly the size of Maine.
You can criticize UCS for being agenda-driven (and we’ve talked about the limitations of “burned area” as a metric), but I’d challenge Bob or others to provide a similarly peer-reviewed research paper that attributes fire effects to his chosen causes.
There is much to talk about in the Wildfire Commission Report. Kelly Martin has offered to talk to us about it (she is a member of the Commission) via Zoom, so please let me know if you are interested. Today, though, I had heard that Commission members were making Hill visits to highlight priority actions. I don’t know what they came up with as priorities, so hopefully someone will let us know. But I thought it might be fun to generate ideas here. There is plenty of expertise among TSW readers. The way the Report is written, it’s an emergency- so that gives us room to think outside the box.. way outside the box!
Here’s mine.
1. Workforce. Of course, give wildland firefighters a living wage and what they are already owed. Work on housing. How about a CE for FS and BLM to develop sites on federal land to house workers? Perhaps for workers’ RVs or trailers, or provide those to them at reasonable cost? Maybe used FEMA trailers? Cheaper and quicker than building permanent housing, as some places are trying. What else can we do?
Perhaps synchronistically, I received in my mailbox this morning a post from a person whose pseudonym is N.S. Lyons, who writes a Substack called The Upheaval. He was talking about the failure of security systems in Israel at the border, but I thought this might be relevant to this topic.
One of the most famous sayings of the legendary U.S. Air Force pilot and strategist Col. John Boyd, who helped develop modern maneuver warfare (and is maybe best known for inventing the “OODA Loop”) was: “People, ideas, machines – in that order!” While warfighting devices were and are important, as are doctrines, tactics, and stratagems, these are all less important than the people doing the fighting, planning, and organizing – and are far less adaptable and reliable. As Boyd would often harangue Generals in the Pentagon, usually to no avail: “Machines don’t fight wars… Humans fight wars!”
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Today we have come to practically worship technology and complexity for its own sake, believing it to be the sorcery that must be able to solve our problems once and for all. Except far too often it actually doesn’t – it just creates the illusion of having done so, while our own capacities have actually diminished and our vulnerabilities to entropy-induced system failure have increased. In this way, technology has increasingly become a false idol, squatting in the place of or even preventing genuine human ingenuity, innovation, and adaptability.
People, ideas, machines.. indeed! So let’s invest in them. First.
2. Build Trust About Use of Beneficial Fire. Having fuels experts live in their communities (see 1) will help. I would add Congress asking the FS to stand down on plan revision until each Forest finishes (including litigation) a plan amendment that develops 1) PODs, or equivalent mapping of potential operational sites 2) conditions and places for prescribed fire and wildland fire use and 3) programs to understand and reduce human-caused ignitions. The amendment would include an EIS for ongoing maintenance of PODs and maybe some programmatic stuff for prescribed fire and wildland fire use. By doing this with an open, public process, communities could quickly get on board with understanding how PODs related to their own efforts and can coordinate. Right now in many places it appears that communities are doing the “random acts of mitigation” without the kind of knowledge that fuels and fire suppression folks from the agencies have available. My thinking is that building trust with individual humans who live in their community, and the kinds of discussions and public involvement that would come with an amendment, will build a solid relationship for working together on mitigation and beneficial fire. If Forests just proceed with plan revisions, fire will be one of many things on a relatively small sample of forests.. is it or ain’t it an emergency?
3. Commission or Workgroup on Wood Waste Utilization. When I read these recommendations in the Report, I thought “we’ve been working on this for forty years now.” And I know some of the folks who continue to work on it today. We have long had grants for this kind of thing, and yet.. Ten years or so ago, I was in a meeting with DOE who wanted to try something at a gigantic scale, and The Wilderness Society who was afraid if we developed markets for small diameter woody material that they would take over politically and the environment would be sacrificed. So all the bright young Colorado entrepreneurs at the meeting gave up. Then there is the question of supply, that 4FRI was developed in part to deal with. When I look around I see excellent efforts by some FS researchers, by Extension faculty at land grants, by entrepreneurs and so on, and yet…we’ve lost capacity in terms of forest economists and utilization specialists. Weirdly we spend more money on modeling problems in the future than on solving problem right in our face (emergencies!). What’s up with that?
California had a 50-member working group on “advancing collaborative action on forest biofuels” (of course biofuels is only one use of woody waste) and produced a report in 2022, plus they have some zones of agreement with ENGO’s so perhaps some of those folks could be tapped to anchor a national Commission or Workgroup. Whatever we have been trying has not been working, and needs organized, comprehensive and dedicated attention. Key stakeholders are small businesses with experience in the space, technology folks, economists and utilization operations specialists, communities and ENGO’s. If we keep doing what we always did, we’re going to get what we always got.
And finally (a girl can dream…)
4. Stick a Fork in the Current Admin’s MOG Initiative..err.. climate resilience and adaptation initiative. Parsing out what treatments are best to protect OG or any forests from wildfire.. would be best developed by fire amendments to forest plans. All hands on deck. Focus. This is what climate adaptation looks like.. worked out day by day with resource professionals and communities in specific places. Many excellent folks are working on MOG who could be working on fire amendments to forest plans, collecting data, etc. Emergency? Yes if you really want to protect OG and mature stands (at least from wildfire).
Firefighters- mysteriously absent from this NY Times story.
What’s interesting to me about this NY Times story is that discussion of adaptation.. most notably, in this case, fire suppression.. is completely missing when discussing bad potential future outcomes. Nothing against reporters.. not having specialists who understand complex topics is a business decision of the Times.
Dr. Hodges, a conservation ecologist at the University of British Columbia Okanagan, also found herself worried about wildlife. She had been studying some Western screech owls that had been nesting in the heart of the fast-moving inferno. “That speed of fire would be difficult for animals to evacuate in front of,” she said. Had the owls escaped in time? And after Canada’s worst wildfire season on record, what would be left for the survivors?
Fire is a natural phenomenon; some species actually benefit from its effects and even those that don’t can be remarkably resilient in the face of flames. But as fires intensify, they are beginning to outstrip nature’s ability to bounce back. “Not all fires have the same impact,” said Morgan Tingley, an ecologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “These megafires are not good for ecosystems.”
Megafires, which dwarf typical wildfires in size, have an immediate ecological toll, killing individual plants and animals that might have survived more contained blazes. In the longer term, changing fire patterns could drive some species out of existence, transform landscapes and utterly remake ecosystems.
Not that long ago, fires were thought to be good and natural. Fish in streams which had died off would come back, and trees regrow on their own time and so on. And smoke was not studied as a problem.
But now we have “megafires” from climate change (and other causes) which are bad. Because they are larger? But of course fires are larger, since suppression folks are building big boxes where possible and using wildfire for resource benefits.
So there’s the acres burned (function of “some unable to suppress, plus some WFU”), severity (function of fuel loads onsite plus fire attributes). Then there’s windspeed, which likely differs by day. The more human-caused ignitions, the greater the change one will take off on a high-wind day. Which is not to say that climate change doesn’t have an impact.. but other factors include difficulty in finding and keeping fire workers ..by paying them (!)and a variety of others.
Plus there is the great incursion of the Military Industrial complex into the wildfire space, on the basis of being able to put fires out more quickly.
Globally, the risk of catastrophic fires could increase by more than 50 percent by the end of the century, the United Nations reported.
It could of course.. or it could decrease by 50%, depending on your assumptions about the success of new technologies. Or if countries around the world decided to not pay firefighters appropriately…
This discussion seems to argue that the sand racer is capable of adapting to wildfire as a species, or perhaps is implying that things will be messed up if fire happens where it did not formerly happen. But did it “not formerly happen” due to suppression or other human factors? Isn’t evolution a process that should be allowed to work? Or can’t be stopped from working when environments change for whatever reason.
The Algerian sand racer, a Mediterranean lizard, lives in a variety of habitats, only some of which experience frequent fires. In a 2021 study, researchers found that lizards collected from fire-prone sites reacted quickly to the smell of smoke, flicking their tongues and running around their terrariums. “In places where fire is not a common threat, lizards did nothing,” said Lola Álvarez-Ruiz, a biologist at the Desertification Research Center in Spain, who conducted the study.
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Fires that consume more fuel may also produce more smoke per unit of area burned, threatening animals far from the flames.“All air-breathing animals are going to be impacted by smoke exposure, because the chemicals in smoke are toxic,” said Olivia Sanderfoot, an ecologist at the University of California, Los Angeles.Smoke inhalation can do more than cause respiratory problems. For months after severe peatland fires produced record air pollution in Indonesia in 2015, Bornean orangutans vocalized less frequently and their voices became harsher.
But if you have lots of material on the ground to be consumed, then what else can you do besides burn it (note “more smoke per unit area”)? Maybe haul some to a sawmill to reduce fuels?
“You could walk half a mile, and you wouldn’t see a single living tree,” said Andrew Stillman, an ecologist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “Increasingly, these fires seem to create habitat conditions that are outside of the norms that these species are adapted to.”
This seems to be an argument that large treeless acreages after wildfire are more common now than before- however for much of history we didn’t have satellite imagery. But I think what’s interesting about this is the idea of “what species are adapted to.” How long does it take for adaptation to occur? Generations are different lengths of time in different species. I think the fear may be that conditions have changed enough that current species will be unable to adapt.
That may be true even for fire-loving animals, like the black-backed woodpecker. The birds nest in scorched trees and feed on the beetle larvae that colonize the charred trunks. But they prefer patches of burned trees that are near stands of leafy, living ones, which protect their fledglings from being picked off by predators, Dr. Stillman and Dr. Tingley, of U.C.L.A., found.
After the enormous Rim fire in California in 2013, scientists searched for the woodpeckers at nearly 500 sites across the expansive burn scar. They found just six birds. “Even though it had created all this great burned habitat, it wasn’t the right kind of burned habitat,” Dr. Tingley said.
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Fewer clusters of living trees can also reduce regrowth. “In many places, we’re not getting regeneration because the seed source is lost,” said Mr. French, of the National Forest System. “It honestly looks like someone went in and just set off a bomb.”
In dry areas, even before climate change was thought to be a thing, we were aware that some tree species can have trouble regenerating without help. We developed and adopted the primitive technologies known at the time as “collecting seed from appropriate sources,” “planting trees” and “protecting seedlings’ which seems to be coming into vogue again.
Scorched, vegetation-less soil, which does not absorb rain well, can also hamper regeneration. Flash flooding after fires can wash ash and sediment into rivers and streams, polluting the water, killing fish and reshaping waterways.
After the Rodeo-Chediski fire in Arizona in 2002, repeated flooding washed away fertile soils that had taken more than 8,000 years to develop. “That has cascading impacts on the kind of plants that can grow,” said Jonathan Long, an ecologist at the U.S. Forest Service, who conducted the research.
What’s particularly interesting about the way that this is reported is that if you click on the link, the study says..
the second site, Swamp Spring, was treated in 2005 by placing large rock riffle formations and vegetation transplants to prevent further incision and stimulate wetland development. The treatment was soon followed by cessation of channel incision and reestablishment of native wetland vegetation, while headcutting caused extensive erosion at the untreated site for eight years.
The theme of this piece seems to be that “scientists (var. ecologists) tell us really bad things may happen more in the future, if we don’t do anything like fire suppression, tree planting, or wetland restoration.” This is actually not all that unusual, either for reporting or for scientific papers.
The commission’s second and final report was submitted to Congress on September 27, 2023 and reflects one of the most sweeping and comprehensive reviews of the wildfire system to date.
The report makes 148 recommendations covering seven key themes:
Urgent New Approaches to address the wildfire crisis
Supporting Collaboration to improve partner involvement at every scale
Shifting from Reactive to Proactive in planning for, mitigating and recovering from fire
Enabling Beneficial Fire to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire
Supporting and Expanding the Workforce to hire and retain the wildland firefighting staff needed to address the crisis
Modernizing Tools for Informed Decision-making to better leverage available technology and information
Investing in Resilience through increased spending now to reduce costs in the long run
Opportunities to Act:
Rather than selecting one or more potential recommendations, the Commission urged an “all of the above” approach, because the scale of the problem requires broad integrated, solutions. While the resulting recommendations are extensive and diverse, they are also complementary and interrelated. With these solutions in hand, the commission is recommending Congress act as quickly as possible.
Commission members will remain empaneled for six months following the final report being submitted to Congress.
