Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumIn 18 Years, Fire Has Utterly Changed NM Forests; Pine Forests Replaced, May Never Return
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Last year, for the second time in three years and the second time in history, more than 10 million acres burned nationwide. Federal land management agencies spent nearly $3 billion fighting fire, just 15 years after that figure first crested $1 billion. The total costs of rebuilding, including some of the 12,000 homes and structures destroyed last season, will likely exceed $25 billion. Here we are, a little more than three months after last years embers cooled, and what promises to be yet another historically expensive, destructive, and very likely deadly fire season is starting anew. Over the coming months, well explore in this column how fires became so intense, so expensive to fight, and so deadly, as well as some of the solutions being tested by top foresters, economists, and scientists to restore fires place in the forest. In other words, well ask: What is the future of fire in America?
According to Trader and many experts in her field, that question may be best answered here amid the remnants of Bandeliers forests. What is happening here, she says, foreshadows what may be coming to many North American forests. In 1995, when Trader first came to the monument as an intern, Bandelier was forested with great stands of ponderosa pines and other conifers that had stood for millennia. Because of recent fires, much of the area is now dominated by locust shrubs; those pines may never return. Weve never seen this before! Trader yells over a gust of wind so strong it knocks her off balance. The vegetationthe composition and structure of the forestits totally different than it was!
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This view still breaks my heart, Trader says. Over her 23-year career, shes seen ponderosa pines disappear from this part of the Jemez. Weve left the mesas we toured earlier and are now at 9,000 feet overlooking Bandeliers recent major fires. Across the Rio Grande Valley, we can see Santa Fe, with the pine-covered Rockies behind it. Below us are canyons that would look at home in the Mojave. The view is a study in contrasts. Through darker lenses, its a look into the future of many western landscapes.
The reasons the pines arent coming back here are myriad. Some seem obvious: Ponderosa pines sprout from seeds held in cones, and there are essentially no cone-producing trees for tens of thousands of acres. Others are less so. For example, the fires actually changed the soils composition. A recent study on how fire affects artifacts found that the only way to replicate Las Conchas heat was in a pottery kiln set to 900 degrees for 15 minutes. When Trader first came back to the park after that fire, the ash was as fine as baby powder and knee-deep. Then the rains came and swept the ash and soil into the Rio Grande in biblical floods. Bandelier is a canary in the coalmine for North American forests when it comes to climate change, says Craig Allen, a researcher at U.S. Geologic Survey who has studied these woods for most of 40 years. Under optimal conditions, the Southwest lies on the dry margin of where ponderosa pine forest can exist. Allen says the warming climate is pushing parts of the Southwest, particularly the lower elevations where ponderosa pine historically dominated, outside those margins. As a general principle, extremes will get more extreme everywhere, Allen says.
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https://www.outsideonline.com/2297996/fires-changing-forests
OnlinePoker
(5,727 posts)Every year previous to 1953 had more than 10 million acres burned, most 3-5 times that amount.
https://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/fireInfo_stats_totalFires.html
hatrack
(59,593 posts)The National Interagency Coordination Center at NIFC compiles annual wildland fire statistics for federal and state agencies. This information is provided through Situation Reports, which have been in use for several decades. Prior to 1983, sources of these figures are not known, or cannot be confirmed, and were not derived from the current situation reporting process. As a result the figures prior to 1983 should not be compared to later data.
msongs
(67,453 posts)human attempts to mange them. just protect developed settlements and let the fires burn around them