Fire and Fuels

River-restoration guru to target creek in Colorado’s Hayman wildfire area

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From the Denver Post here.

DECKERS — The U.S. Forest Service has deployed a river-restoration guru in a $4.5 million gambit to accelerate recovery on a first segment of the South Platte tributaries ruined a decade ago by a massive human-caused wildfire.

The project launched this week by foresters and private-sector partners will try to rework the altered flow of Trail Creek to make it more natural.
For Fort Collins-based hydrologist Dave Rosgen, this also is a chance to demonstrate techniques increasingly in demand worldwide.
The problem is that the aftermath of the Hayman fire unleashed torrents of sediment — sand and decomposed Pikes Peak​ granite — that slumps from barren mountainsides into an estimated 157 miles of streams.

Before the 2002 fire, for example, Trail Creek carried 1,200 tons of sediment a year. Now foresters say 20,000 tons a year course through the creek, which flows into West Creek, Horse Creek and then the South Platte River​, which is the major source of water for people in the Denver metropolis.
Denver Water managers’ struggle to manage the sediment in both Cheesman and Strontia Springs reservoirs is driving up monthly water bills. At Strontia Springs, the utility is involved in a $29 million project to dredge out 675,000 tons of sediment.
Enter Rosgen.
“This is how Mother Nature does it,” he said Friday, describing his plan to stabilize what has become a sluice for corrosive sediment.
The steep banks will first be reshaped, and fallen tree trunks will be used to reinforce the new channel. Then, the stream bed will be raised by about 7 feet so water carrying sediment disperses into a willow studded plane instead of racing down stream.
“We’re going to basically go back in here and re-establish a braided, meandering channel,” Rosgen, 69, told a gathering of county and federal employees.
Amid budget-cutting, federal environmental stewards have turned to private-sector partners for help containing the damage. The National Forest Foundation and the Coalition for the Upper South Platte coordinated funding, with contributions of $750,000 from ski goliath Vail Associates, $500,000 from Aurora Water and $200,000 from the Gates Family Foundation.

Rosgen has developed formulas for calculating rates of erosion, enabling detailed analysis of mountain slopes, fire impact and hydrology. His team at Wildland Hydrology Inc. has restored dozens of damaged streams in Argentina, Costa Rica, Tanzania and around the western United States.

Ever since the Hayman fire, heavy rains have led to increasingly severe flooding across the scorched burn area. Foresters and volunteers have tried to address this, planting 3.5 million tree seedlings.
“But it seems that 137,000 acres doesn’t heal as quickly as we’d like it to,” said Pikes Peak District Ranger Brent Botts.
Eroding mountainsides and clogged streams eventually would stabilize on their own, Rosgen said, but not until the whole area burned by the fire is reforested — a process expected to take 80 years. Meanwhile, the growing Front Range​ population demands water and healthy mountain fisheries for wildlife and recreation.

That forces a decision of whether to intervene by re-engineering key tributaries, Rosgen said. “We’ll work with the river, not against it” with a goal of “getting back to a natural rate of erosion that is acceptable,” he said.
Over the next year, his crews with heavy machinery “will come as close as we can to duplicating the stable natural form of the rivers and their processes,” Rosgen said. “We will become a copycat of nature.”

WUI Fuel Treatment Potential Zone of Agreement 1.0

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We have been having a fascinating discussion about dead trees burning differently, but I wonder if debates about the science obfuscate an underlying reality of agreement. I am wondering, that’s all.

This morning, I am proposing that we may all agree that

Fuel treatments (completed with fuel removed) to create defensible space and change fire behavior within 1/2 mile of a community are generally OK.

I would like to throw this proposition out there and see what everyone thinks.. because if everyone agrees to this proposition (or and edited version), much of the “science” discussion is not relevant (historic patterns, etc.). We are interested in making conditions safe for firefighters by changing structure (not having jackstrawed piles of dead trees, for example) and fuel conditions around communities (we can discuss what “communities” means).

Some people think that we should just let the homes burn and not put firefighters in, thereby solving the problem (and saving much money, both for fuel treatments and for suppression) but this does not seem socially and politically realistic.

I would be interested to know what people on this blog think about the proposition. Feel free to propose edits. From this discussion, I’d like to move on to the question of fuel treatments that are not in the WUI.

Check out some of this paper and other photos from the Wallow fire and fuel treatments.

Ecologists question research on burns in bug-killed forests after Montana fires

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Photo by Matt Stensland
Thanks to Derek for submitting. From the Missoulian here.

Last summer, a wall of flame roared through a three-mile stretch of tinder-dry, bug-killed lodgepole pine forest and forced a large group of firefighters to retreat to a safety zone.

An official said later the flames moved through the trees like fire does through grass.

In the upper West Fork of the Bitterroot, another fire blew through 17,000 acres in a day. Much of that area also was covered by lodgepole pine killed by mountain pine beetle.

That unusual fire behavior now has some fire ecologists questioning conventional research that suggests that wildfires won’t burn as fiercely through forests filled with bug-killed trees.

“We definitely saw some unusual and pretty amazing runs under fire conditions that we would normally consider to be moderate,” said Matt Jolly, a research ecologist with the Rocky Mountain Research Station’s Fire Sciences Laboratory in Missoula.

Earlier research based on modeling suggested that stands of dead and dying trees were not as prone to flare into fast-moving crown fires. And if the fire did manage to make it into the crowns, the research said it was unlikely to stay there long.

Firefighters and researchers saw something quite different happen this summer.

“These fires were quite a bit more active than what the conventional research suggests,” Jolly said. “The problem is most of the conventional research used simulation models. If you don’t have good observations, then you have to assume the models are correct.”

Before this year, the past three summers were marked by very wet Augusts, which is typically the peak of the wildfire season in western Montana.

“We’ve been dodging the bullet, if you will, over the last three seasons,” Jolly said.

Canadians have been reporting similar fires in their own forests filled with beetle-killed trees for a number of years.

The fires this summer burned in conditions that weren’t considered extreme over an understory that was often still green. At times, the solid walls of flame reached from the ground to far above the canopy.

In some cases, the fire was burning through a forest of mostly dead trees that had already shed most of their needles.

***

Jolly said trees attacked by mountain pine beetles start a downward spiral that makes them more susceptible to fire early on. Once the trees die, their needles turn red before falling off. The red needles are extremely flammable.

Once the needles fall off, the forest has a gray appearance. This summer, Jolly said the fires blew through those standing gray stands.

“A lot of people have proposed that once the needles fall off, there’s little opportunity for a crown fire,” he said. “In these gray stands, you essentially have a vertical dead fuel with extremely low fuel moistures that once ignited, can create a flaming front.”

Fire researchers also noted the fires were quick to form a column that created its own weather, which further enhanced burning conditions.

For these fires to occur, Jolly said fuel conditions, weather and topography have to be aligned just right.

In many cases, the fire conditions were not considered extreme.

“These fires burned under less than extreme conditions in the same way that a healthy stand would burn under extreme conditions,” Jolly said.

The dead stands are made up of vertical fuels that respond quickly to changes in the weather and humidity levels.

“That’s why it happens very quickly,” he said.

***

With hundreds of thousands of acres of bug-killed stands scattered across the West, Jolly said there is a “very real possibility” of seeing more fires like this past summer’s.

“It’s totally dependent on weather,” he said. “As soon as we have a dry year like we saw in 2000 or 2003, which came with a very prolonged period of drying, it will be very interesting to see what happens.”

Bitterroot West Fork District Ranger Dave Campbell said research like Jolly’s will be important to those who fight and attempt to manage the blazes.

“This was a good opportunity for us to partner with the fire lab, which has some of the best fire scientists around,” he said. “Hopefully, we will be able to make the models for the future.”

Read more: http://missoulian.com/news/local/article_33e5c862-f930-11e0-9771-001cc4c03286.html#ixzz1bEYungr1

Fourmile Canyon Fire Report Confirms Firewise

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The Rocky Mountain Research Station released its Fourmile Canyon Fire report, requested by Senator Udall of Colorado. The Report confirms that:

1) A home’s fate depends upon fuel in its immediate surroundings and construction materials;

2) Fuel treatments, especially those that leave fine fuels untreated, are ineffective protection against wildfires that threaten homes, i.e., windy, dry conditions; and,

3) Fire suppression resources are easily overwhelmed precisely when Fire-Unwise homes need them the most.

The report took a special look at aerial attack, finding that the great preponderance of retardant was dropped after the fire had already stopped advancing.

Colt Summit- Garrity Editorial

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Here’s the link, thanks to Matthew Koehler for submitting this..

Guest column by MIKE GARRITY | Posted: Thursday, October 6, 2011
Government has to follow laws as well

How ironic is it that while the Missoulian was chastising the Alliance for the Wild Rockies for filing a lawsuit to protect the environment in its editorial last Sunday (Oct. 2) the Alliance, the Environmental Protection Agency and Montana’s Department of Environmental Quality had just reached an agreement in a lawsuit originally brought by the Alliance 14 years ago.

The agreement has huge benefits for cleaning up Montana’s rivers, streams and lakes that would not have happened without the lawsuit and subsequent settlement agreement. Here’s a direct quote from the Reuters article that appeared in the L.A. Times, the Chicago Tribune and other major papers and media outlets nationwide.

“Richard Opper, head of the Montana Department of Environmental Quality, credited the 14-year-old lawsuit brought by environmentalists with making the state ‘get its act together.’ ‘We lost the original case, and we deserved to lose,’ he told Reuters in a telephone interview on Monday. ‘In the old days, we weren’t following that federal law very well. Now we have a new attitude, and we are doing the right thing.’ ”

Opper’s quote and the credit he gives the Alliance for bringing the lawsuit is timely considering the Missoulian editorial board’s stance. More importantly, it brings the seminal issue to the forefront: We are a nation of laws, not a nation where a handful of “collaborators” can decide which laws will or won’t be followed. Government agencies, just like the rest of us, have to follow the law.

Had the “collaborative” Colt-Summit logging project – for which the Missoulian criticized the Alliance – followed federal law, the Alliance would have applauded it. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. The agency refused to follow the law or heed well-documented evidence. And so, as part of the process proscribed by law, we were forced to file a lawsuit in federal district court to stop this timber sale for the sake of taxpayers as well as the elk, fish, grizzly bears, lynx and a myriad of other old growth dependent species that rely on unlogged national forests.

Consider these points:

• The plan to log federally designated critical habitat for lynx and bull trout as well as prime grizzly habitat violates a host of federal laws including the National Environmental Policy Act, the National Forest Management Act and the Endangered Species Act.

• The Forest Service’s own analysis notes that 94 percent of the project is in an area that the Lolo Forest Plan requires to be managed for the benefit of grizzly bears as its top priority. The agency also admits that logging and the new roads that go with it will reduce important wildlife hiding cover and that similar logging on adjacent private lands has harmed big game and grizzly bear habitat. Yet, the agency and the collaborators who support the logging plan fail to explain how reduction of existing cover levels on our national forests can possibly be called “restoration.”

• Contrary to Forest Service claims, the logging destroys lynx habitat since it drives out the snowshoe hare and ground squirrels, upon which they prey. The Forest Service’s own research show that lynx do not use forest lands that have been recently clearcut or thinned. In fact, forests that have been logged in the Seeley-Swan Valley are avoided by lynx.

• The Forest Service’s own environmental assessment reveals that this timber sale will cost taxpayers over $1.5 million with little in return except the destruction of critical wildlife habitat. Given the current national debate over government spending, an expensive and destructive timber sale to benefit a for-profit corporation is not defensible.

• The Alliance and its environmental allies fully participated in the Colt Summit process, which is required before anyone can file a lawsuit challenging the Forest Service’s decision.

“Collaborators” do not make laws – and we all have to follow the law. The Missoulian would do its readers a favor by remembering that before it criticizes the Alliance for the Wild Rockies – or any other citizen group – for trying to get the federal government to follow the law.

Mike Garrity is executive director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies.

Managing Forests to Manage Wildfires: Podcast from Science Friday

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Plant-covered land is red in the June 21 false-color image of the Wallow fire burn scar. Patches of unburned forest are bright red. Flecks of black indicate some burning. The charcoal-colored areas burned severely. NASA Earth Observatory image by Jesse Allen using data from the NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team.

Thanks to Foto for forwarding the link to this podcast(http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/201109231) on the Arizona fires, with Dr. Wally Covington and others. From Science Friday.

Managing Forests To Manage Wildfires

Plant-covered land is red in the June 21 false-color image of the Wallow fire burn scar. Patches of unburned forest are bright red. Flecks of black indicate some burning. The charcoal-colored areas burned severely. NASA Earth Observatory image by Jesse Allen using data from the NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team.

Record breaking fires in the Southwest have burned thousands of acres, disrupting people and animals, and leaving muddy, flood-prone landscapes in their wake. In this remote broadcast from Flagstaff, Arizona, Ira Flatow and guests discuss fire ecology, and how new forest management strategies may help stifle the blazes.
Guests

William Wallace Covington
Regents’ Professor of Forest Ecology
Executive Director, The Ecological Restoration Institute
Northern Arizona University
Flagstaff, Arizona

Mary Lata
Fire Ecologist
U.S. Forest Service / USDA
Flagstaff, Arizona

Paul Summerfelt
Firefighter, Type 1 Team Incident Commander
Wildland Fire Management Officer
City of Flagstaff
Flagstaff, Arizona

NY Times on “Forests are Dying” and Carbon

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Thanks to Marek Smith for this piece on carbon and forests.
Here’s more on “forests are dying”.
It’s worth reading the whole thing, plus some of the sidebars. I just quoted the part here on our favorite topic, fires’n’bugs.

Wildfires and Bugs

Stripping the bark of a tree with a hatchet, Diana L. Six, a University of Montana insect scientist, pointed out the telltale signs of infestation by pine beetles: channels drilled by the creatures as they chewed their way through the juicy part of the tree.

The tree she was pointing out was already dead. Its needles, which should have been deep green, displayed the sickly red that has become so commonplace in the mountainous West. Because the beetles had cut off the tree’s nutrients, the chlorophyll that made the needles green was breaking down, leaving only reddish compounds.

Pine beetles are a natural part of the life cycle in Western forests, but this outbreak, under way for more than a decade in some areas, is by far the most extensive ever recorded. Scientists say winter temperatures used to fall to 40 degrees below zero in the mountains every few years, killing off many beetles. “It just doesn’t happen anymore,” said a leading climate scientist from the University of Montana, Steven W. Running, who was surveying the scene with Dr. Six one recent day.

As the climate has warmed, various beetle species have marauded across the landscape, from Arizona to Alaska. The situation is worst in British Columbia, which has lost millions of trees across an area the size of Wisconsin.

The species Dr. Six was pointing out, the mountain pine beetle, has pushed farther north into Canada than ever recorded. The beetles have jumped the Rocky Mountains into Alberta, and fears are rising that they could spread across the continent as temperatures rise in coming decades. Standing on a mountain plateau south of Missoula, Dr. Six and Dr. Running pointed to the devastation the beetles had wrought in the forest around them, consisting of a high-elevation species called whitebark pine.

“We were going to try to do like an eight-year study up here. But within three years, all this has happened,” Dr. Six said sadly.

“It’s game over,” Dr. Running said.

Later, flying in a small plane over the Montana wilderness, Dr. Running said beetles were not the only problem confronting the forests of the West.

Warmer temperatures are causing mountain snowpack, on which so much of the life in the region depends, to melt earlier in most years, he said. That is causing more severe water deficits in the summer, just as the higher temperatures cause trees to need extra water to survive. The whole landscape dries out, creating the conditions for intense fires. Even if the landscape does not burn, the trees become so stressed they are easy prey for beetles.

From the plane, Dr. Running pointed out huge scars where fires had destroyed stands of trees in recent years. “Nothing can stop the wildfires when they get to this magnitude,” he said. Some of the fire scars stood adjacent to stands of lodgepole pine destroyed by beetles.

At the moment, the most severe problems in the nation’s forests are being seen in the Southwestern United States, in states like Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. The region has been so dry that huge, explosive fires consumed millions of acres of vegetation and thousands of homes and other buildings this summer.

This year’s drought came against the background of an overall warming and drying of the Southwestern climate, which scientists say helps to explain the severe effects. But the role of climate change in causing the drought itself is unclear — the more immediate cause is an intermittent weather pattern called La Niña, and research is still under way on whether that cycle is being altered or intensified by global warming, as some researchers suspect. Because of the continuing climatic change, experts say some areas that are burning this year may never return as forest — they are more likely to grow back as heat-tolerant grass or shrub lands, storing far less carbon than the forests they replace.

“A lot of ecologists like me are starting to think all these agents, like insects and fires, are just the proximate cause, and the real culprit is water stress caused by climate change,” said Robert L. Crabtree, head of a center studying the Yellowstone region. “It doesn’t really matter what kills the trees — they’re on their way out. The big question is, Are they going to regrow? If they don’t, we could very well catastrophically lose our forests.”

A couple of thoughts..

It’s interesting to me that people are predicting that trees are “on their way out”. I wonder specifically what evidence is there for this? I wonder about what I call the “pontification to data ratio” of some of these observations.

It’s also interesting when people use the term “devastation” to describe mountain pine beetle killed forests. Because “natural” cycles vs. “climate change induced” cycles look exactly the same (acres of dead trees).

Southwest blazes this year less severe than initially thought — study

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Photo from USGS

Thanks to Matthew Koehler for suggesting this for the blog.

WILDFIRE: Southwest blazes this year less severe than initially thought — study

April Reese, E&E reporter/Published: Thursday, September 29, 2011

While much of the public saw the record-setting wildfires that burned through Arizona and New Mexico last summer as disastrous, the fires were actually less severe than many thought and are likely to bring significant ecological benefits over the long term, according to a new study from an environmental group.

But Forest Service officials say it is too early to draw broad conclusions about how the fires affected tens of thousands of acres scorched by the Wallow, Horseshoe II, Las Conchas and Pacheco conflagrations.

Wallow fire map

A new study issued by WildEarth Guardians asserts that fire damage caused four major blazes across the Southwest last summer, including the Wallow Fire (mapped above), was not as extensive as initially thought. Map courtesy of WildEarth Guardians.

Bryan Bird, public lands program director for WildEarth Guardians, who co-authored the report with Kurt Menke of Bird’s Eye View GIS LLC, an Albuquerque-based company specializing in geographic information systems, said his group felt there was a need to educate people about the true impacts of the blazes.

“There was just such a wide perception out there that these fires were just completely destructive, we wanted to make clear that these fires were in some areas beneficial,” Bird said.

By examining satellite data measuring vegetation characteristics before and after the fires, Bird and Menke concluded that lands within the four fire zones burned in a mosaic pattern, with fire severity ranging from high to low.

For example, within the perimeter of the Wallow fire, which burned 538,000 acres on the Arizona-New Mexico border, more than 64 percent of the lands burned at low intensity or not at all, while 16 percent burned at high severity and 20 percent burned at moderate severity.

For the Las Conchas fire, which scorched 156,600 acres in northern New Mexico, including parts of Bandelier National Monument and the Valles Caldera National Preserve, about 20 percent of the area was severely burned, while most of the lands burned either at low severity (39 percent) or moderate severity (about 29 percent).

How the fire behaved in a given area depended on a range of factors, including forest type, dryness and whether fuel treatments had been done in the area.

“These four fires exhibited very different characteristics and consequences because of the wide variety of ecosystems in which they burned as well as the variable conditions,” according to the report, which notes that the findings need to be verified with field surveys. “Not all of the acreage within the fire perimeters burned severely, and in fact much was unburned or burned only at low and moderate severity.”
Inconclusive results?

But Penny Luehring, leader of the Forest Service’s national Burned Area Emergency Response program, which is based in the Southwest regional office in Albuquerque, N.M., said Bird and Menke based their assessment on soil burn severity data, not vegetation burn severity data, and therefore it cannot be considered conclusive.

“The information that they have in their report aligns quite well with what the Forest Service has collected in terms of soil burn severity, but it’s a measurement of the severity on the soil itself, not a measurement of the effect on vegetation,” she said. “You could you have a lot of burned trees, for example, and you wouldn’t notice them on a soil burn severity map.”

Luehring said the Forest Service plans to conduct field assessments of the effects of the fires on trees and other vegetation over the next several months.

While the report’s conclusions may well turn out to be true, Luehring suggested the data are not yet there to support them.

But Bird said he stands by the report, explaining that the datasets he and Menke used, which were from the Forest Service’s “Burned Area Reflectance Classifications,” did include information on vegetation changes as well as effects on bare soil.

Melissa Savage, an adjunct professor at the University of New Mexico and director of the Four Corners Institute, a Santa Fe-based organization that provides scientific expertise to communities undertaking ecological restoration projects, said she believes the report’s conclusions are likely to be borne out with field studies.

“It will probably be largely verified when we get on the ground,” Savage said.

The report makes several recommendations, including using prescribed burns or naturally ignited fires every five to 20 years to maintain the fuel-clearing benefits of fire and keeping development out of forested areas.

New Mexico still has about 600 square miles of undeveloped private lands adjacent to fire-prone public lands, and Arizona has 400 square miles of such lands, the report notes.

Click here to read the study.
Reese writes from Santa Fe, N.M.

Unprecedented Change vs. Inferring From History: Bark Beetles and Fire

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Thanks to Matthew Koehler for sending this piece on one of our favorite topics, beetles and fire by Kulakowski and Jarvis. This is a great article to discuss, to talk about why different people might think this is or isn’t relevant to current policy issues (and which ones and why). Also bbs and fire is one of our favorite things to discuss on this blog.

Here’s the abstract with my comments in italics.

“Outbreaks of bark beetles and drought both lead to concerns about increased fire risk, but the relative importance of these two factors is the subject of much debate.

I would argue, not really in practice, only in academia. In reality, drought beetles and age of trees are hopelessly intertwined. And not to be pedantic but it’s not about risk of fires, it’s about “different fire behavior (due to dry trees) with more possible negative impacts to people and soil.”

We examined how mountain pine beetle (MPB) outbreaks and drought have contributed to the fire regime of lodgepole pine forests in northwestern Colorado and adjacent areas of southern Wyoming over the past century. We used dendroecological methods to reconstruct the pre-fire history of MPB outbreaks in twenty lodgepole pine stands that had burned between 1939 and 2006 and in 20 nearby lodgepole pine stands that were otherwise similar but that had not burned. Our data represent c. 80% of all large fires that had occurred in lodgepole pine forests in this study area over the past century. We also compared Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI)
and actual evapotranspiration (AET) values between fire years and non-fire years.

To me, you gotta pick a lane here. Either we are saying that current and future climate conditions are “unprecedented” and are affecting things (which I believe, whether caused by GHG’s or other factors), OR information from 1939 to 2006 can be used to make claims about what is true in nature today.

Burned stands were no more likely to have been affected by outbreak prior to fires than were nearby unburned stands. However, PDSI and AET values were both lower during fire years than during non-fire years. This work indicates that climate has been more important than outbreaks to the fire regime of lodgepole pine forests in this
region over the past century.

I will leave to the climate scientists if a particular drought is really “climate”- I always find that confusing. I don’t think anyone would be surprised to know that more fires occur under drought conditions, if that’s what this is saying.

Indeed, we found no detectable increase in the occurrence of high-severity fires following MPB outbreaks. Dry conditions, rather than changes in fuels associated with outbreaks,appear to be most limiting to the occurrence of severe fires in these forests.

But like I said, it’s not really about “occurrence in the past”. We can go out on the ground and see dried forests due to pine beetles or other reasons, and see that they have different fire behavior, and we can see impacts of high intensity fires with or without bark beetles. I just don’t get the link between this study and any policy issue today, and maybe the authors are not claiming that.