[Vision2020] Forest Fire Research Questions the Wisdom of Prescribed Burns

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September 17, 2012
Forest Fire Research Questions the Wisdom of Prescribed Burns By JIM
ROBBINS<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/jim_robbins/index.html>

MISSOULA, Mont. — On a forested mountainside that was charred in a wildfire
in 2003, Richard Hutto, a University of Montana ornithologist, plays a
recording of a black-backed woodpecker drumming on a tree.

The distinctive tattoo goes unanswered until Dr. Hutto is ready to leave.
Then, at the top of a tree burned to charcoal, a woodpecker with black
feathers, a white breast and a yellow slash on its crown hammers a rhythmic
response.

“This forest may have burned,” says Dr. Hutto, smiling, “but that doesn’t
mean it’s dead. There’s a lot going on.”

The black-backed woodpecker’s drum signals more than the return of life to
the forest. It also may be an important clue toward resolving a debate
about how much, and even whether, to try to prevent large forest fires.

Scientists are at loggerheads over whether there is an ecological advantage
to thinning forests and using prescribed fire to reduce fuel for subsequent
fires — or whether those methods actually diminish ecological processes and
biodiversity.

The United States Forest
Service<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/f/forest_service/index.html?inline=nyt-org>,
which manages nearly 200 million acres of public land, believes limited
thinning and burning will prevent catastrophic wildfires. The agency
contracts with logging companies to cut down large and small trees across
sweeping landscapes, and uses prescribed fire. Besides protecting homes,
experts say, these methods also recreate the natural state of the forest.

The approach, developed primarily as a result of tree ring studies, seeks
to reconstruct the forests of the West before the 20th century, when the
large-scale suppression of wildfire first occurred. Some ecologists and
environmentalists, however, are challenging the Forest Service’s model,
saying it is based on incomplete science and is causing ecological damage.

Recent research, they say, shows that nature often caused far more severe
fires than tree ring records show. That means the ecology of Western
forests depends on fires of varying degrees of severity, including what we
think of as catastrophic fires, not just the kinds of low-intensity blazes
that current Forest Service policy favors.

They say that large fires, far from destroying forests, can be a shot of
adrenaline that stimulates biodiversity.

The black-backed woodpecker could be an important indicator of which side
is correct.

The bird lives almost exclusively in severely burned forests. It thrives on
the fire-chaser beetle and the jewel beetle, which are adapted to fires and
can detect heat 30 miles away with infrared sensors under their legs. Both
species lay eggs only in scorched trees whose defenses have been wiped out
by fire.

The black-backed woodpeckers feast on the beetles’ grubs. Their coloring
has evolved to blend in with charred trees so they are not visible to hawks
and other predators as they peck away.

Tracking the presence of the woodpeckers can indicate whether there are
enough severe fires to stimulate their ecosystems, and keep their numbers,
as well as those of other species, healthy.

William Baker, a fire and landscape ecologist at the University of Wyoming,
contends that the kind of limited fires that are being employed to control
bigger fires were not as common in nature as has been thought.

For a recent paper<http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1466-8238.2011.00750.x/abstract>in
the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography, published with Mark
Williams, Dr. Baker employed an unorthodox method to reconstruct fire
history that challenges current analysis of tree rings. (The study was
financed by the National Science Foundation and the United States
Department of Agriculture.)

Dr. Baker and Dr. Williams examined thousands of handwritten records
created by agents of the federal General Land Office who surveyed
undeveloped land in the West in the mid-19th century. The surveyors used an
ax to mark trees at precise intervals and took meticulous notes on what the
vegetation between marked trees looked like — meadow, burned forest or
mature trees.

Altogether, Dr. Baker’s students combed through 13,000 handwritten records
on 28,000 marked trees, and hiked miles in Oregon, Colorado and Arizona to
find some of the trees and compare today’s conditions with those from the
1800s.

They found that low-intensity fires that occurred naturally were not as
widespread as other research holds, and that they did not prevent more
severe fires. Dr. Baker concluded that big fires are inevitable, and argues
that it is best for ecosystems — and less expensive — to put up with them.

“Our research shows that reducing fuels isn’t going to reduce severity
much,” he said. “Even if you reduce fuels, you are still going to have
severe fires” because of extreme weather.

Jennifer Marlon, a paleoecologist at Yale who has studied 3,000 years of
fire history in the West, said her work led to a similar conclusion.
Compared with the last several thousand years, she said, “fires in the West
the last hundred years have been unusually low.”

But other fire researchers say they are not yet ready to abandon the
current model.

“It’s interesting data and needs to be tested,” said Peter M. Brown, a
dendrochronologist in Fort Collins, Colo., who studies fire history and
consults with the Forest Service. But it’s not nearly enough, he said, to
change the current model.

Some see support for the argument against prescribed burning in the fading
populations of black-backed woodpeckers in California, Oregon and South
Dakota. This year four environmental groups filed a
petition<http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/species/birds/black-backed_woodpecker/pdfs/BBWO_FESA_Petition.pdf>to
have the bird declared endangered, blaming the Forest Service’s policy
for the decline.

Proponents of the free-fire theory say that while human lives and property
should be protected, beyond that widespread wildfires should be viewed as
necessary ecological events that reset the clock on a landscape to provide
habitats for numerous species for years and even decades to come. This
principle stems from research into “disturbance ecology.” For instance,
when a hurricane blows down a large swath of forest or a volcano erupts, it
strongly stimulates an ecosystem, scientists have found.

“Disturbances are very important; they are huge,” said Mark Swanson, a
Washington State University ecologist who recently published a paper noting
that recovered areas thrived after the eruption of Mount St. Helens in
1980. “You actually have an increase in species richness, sometimes to
regionally high levels.”

Dr. Hutto, the University of Montana ornithologist, said he believes the
Forest Service approach was misguided. He pointed out that morel mushrooms
thrive on charred ground, and birds, including the mountain bluebird and
black-backed woodpecker, then move in.

Similarly, a plant called snowbush can remain dormant in the soil for
centuries until heat from a fire cracks its seed coat, and it blooms
profusely.

“The first year after a fire is when the magic really happens,” Dr. Hutto
said.




-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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