Western Drought Has Sierra Nevada Forests Ready For The Flames

Eric Roussel and colleagues were working down in the Sweetwater Range a few months back when they noticed something unusual. The Nevada Division of Forestry crew, conducting a fuels reduction project in a thick stand of pinyon-juniper, felled trees that normally discharge a thick soup of sticky sap.

"Typically when you cut them down they're a pretty sappy mess," Roussel said. "We noticed that consistently, there just wasn't any sap." These pinyon and juniper trees were remarkably dry, showing the compounding impacts of three dry winters that have left them stressed and sickly, prone to insect attack. And ready to burn.

It's one of the more worrying consequences of the drought now withering western Nevada and the Sierra. From the pinyon-juniper stands in the Sweetwaters and Pine Nut Mountains south of Reno to the pine forests higher in the Sierra to the west, drought-stressed forests are in particular danger from wildfire during the summer of 2014. The danger is said to be notably severe in the timbered high country.

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Since 1984, the area burned by the West's largest wildfires of more than 1,000 acres have increased by about 87,700 acres a year, according to an April study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. And the areas where fire has been increasing the most are areas where drought has been worsening and "that certainly points to climate being a major contributor," Philip Dennison of the University of Utah, the study's main author, said. The top five years with the most acres burned have all happened in the last decade, according to federal records. From 2010 through 2013, about 6.4 million acres a year burned on average compared to 2.9 million acres a year in the 1980s.

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http://www.rgj.com/story/tech/environment/2014/06/23/drought-forests-ready-burn/11181721/