Tag: burning

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Fire in the forests

You cannot exclude fire from the forests, but you can manage it. We tried for decades to put out fires. It seemed a good idea at the time, but it changed the ecology of the forest, making it susceptible to larger and more disastrous fires. Fire is a natural part of the pine ecosystems. Only about 2% of the fires WERE intense enough to kill ponderosa pine. Recently, however, they have been hotter, due to the earlier fire repression regimes that allowed a lot of fuel build up. The forest service is now managing WITH fire rather than against it, but it may take decades to restore the forests to the stable & sustainable systems they were.

My pictures show the results of a big fire in 2000. Notice the aspens in the foreground. They need full sun to grow. Soon after a big fire, they sprout up. often from extensive root system. A patch of of trees is often the SAME tree. In the relative shelter of the aspens, gradually the pines take over again. The aspen ecosystem is short term. A pine ecosystem can persist for centuries.

North of the Grand Canyon, it is cool enough in some places to support firs, spruces and the Canadian regime plants. These are perhaps more fragile ecosystems. They are relics of the much colder times during the last ice age around 10,000 years ago. They persist, but if they are destroyed they are often replaced by species more adapted to the now warmer and drier conditions. BTW – I am talking about warmer and drier BEFORE the climate change we now expect. Presumably the challenge will get harder.

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Yellowstone – and natural clearcuts

Yellowstone is the oldest of the national parks, founded in 1872.  We drove in from the East Entrance.  The area was burned in 2003 and is just recovering now.  I guess it was a very hot and extensive fire. In Virginia, my loblolly pines planted in 2003 are big and robust.  Things grow slower in the cooler mountain air in Yellowstone.  They did not replant, depending on natural regeneration and I think there was a problem with seed source.  I asked the rangers I met about the land, but I don’t think they really had all the information.   If anybody knows more, I would appreciate the comments. You can see my loblolly in Virginia below. The land was clear cut in 2003.

Below is a Yellowstone forest that was burned in 1988.  It is coming back thick.  If we were managing this land for forestry, we would have replanted and thinned by now twice.

Of course, goals are different.  As I wrote in an earlier post, we have a different – more complex and nuanced view of natural succession.  When I learned ecology in the 1970s, we sort of believed that the forest was the goal.  We would determine the “highest use” and judge anything not up to that as deficient.  We now understand that every stage is similarly valuable.  A burned (or cut) forests becomes a meadow, then a young forest, middle forest and maybe an old growth if it is around long enough. All the stages are attractive. There is no finish line.  In a park like Yellowstone, they have time and are managing with nature.  This means letting things sometimes burn.

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Fire in the forests

Fire is unavoidable in natural systems. What and how it burns is often a human choice. The article acknowledges good fire management in Southern pine country, where practice and culture accept prescribed burning. There is an irony in the West. Westerners sometimes feel closer to nature, but the region is the most urban, i.e. people living in cities, in the U.S. People living in cities surrounded by vast open and ostensibly natural spaces, IMO, make make it harder to manage land well, since those whose experience with land consists mostly of hiking and vacationing tend to think that nature requires no management.

Southern fire managers have more practical experience than anybody else. It was not always so and it is earned knowledge. It would be good to apply that knowledge elsewhere. I recommend looking at the Southern Fire Exchange.

The linked article quotes Scott L. Stephens, professor of fire science at the University of California at Berkeley, saying, “Why don’t we hear about all these houses burning down and people dying in the South? They’re doing a better job.”

Scientists say megafires in West will grow bigger, hotter www.washingtonpost.com

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Fires: Wild and Planned

Fire is an important part of ecology of savanna and grassland biomes. I described my visit to the Texas arboretum.  That is the kind of place I would like to visit over and over, since I am sure lots of things are happening, seasonally and in terms of management.  Fire management is a big part and I was interested in looking at the results of different fire regimes. The three pictures show different fire management. The top picture was burned in the summer. The middle picture shows a winter burn and the bottom was burned in the fall. They should also have an unburned section for comparison.

I don’t know how long ago they were burned. The sign did not say and it is harder to tell than you might think. This sort of Savanna vegetation grows back very fast when the fire is not too hot. I would contrast that with a big burn I saw along Hwy 71. There were acres of dead trees and devastated land. I looked it up on the Internet and learned that there was a big fire here in 2010 that destroyed 600 homes and 30,000 acres. It was a hot and destructive fire.  It obviously jumped a big highway, so a fire break would not have worked.

I am certified by the State of Virginia as a fire manager. I would not trust my skills on the ground w/o lots of help, but I did take the certification course.  I wrote about fire here, here, here, here,  here, & here, among others.  I just love the subject of ecosystem management. Below is a Virginia forest that had big understory burn.  The ferns you see in the picture are “fire ferns”.  They often come after the burn. This is two years after the fire. This was not a planned fire. It scorched the needles and some people thought the trees were dead. They were not.

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The Joy of Setting Fires (and the Joy of life in General)

If you want to grow longleaf pine, you need fire. Longleaf is a fire-dependent species. And we want to grow longleaf pine.  That is why we clear cut five acres when we did the thinning last winter.  A few weeks ago we sprayed to get at the poplars, which had grown from roots and now we are burning.  This procedure is called “brown and burn” BTW. My friend Eric Goodman got some longleaf seedlings free. which will go in next spring.  Our friends at the Department of Forestry made fire lanes with their tractor. My friends Larry Walker and Frank Meyer did the burning. I am the luckiest man in the world. People always help.  Together we are creating a demonstration forest in Brunswick County. It will showcase the best forestry practices for our part of Virginia.   It includes already a wonderful stand of loblolly.  We will apply different silvicultural practices (various thinning densities, fire, herbicide treatments etc) to show the different results. 

More about the forest plan is here & here.  Pictures of the thinning are here .

The longleaf are near the edge of their range in southern Virginia, so it is less certain. If the climate changes, however, the range may move north. Longleaf once grew all around the South. Today they are less common because they are harder to grow than loblolly. That is why the State of Virginia is helping us grow them.  Longleaf require fire to grow well and are hard to establish. Once established they are a great tree. The only caveat is the long needles (hence long leaf).  Ice storms can weigh down the branches and cause damage.  Individual longleaf are beautiful trees and a vigorous stand of longleaf is even more beautiful.  I won’t live long enough to see my trees mature, but I hope to enjoy their vigorous adolescence.

My experience in forestry has greatly exceeded my expectations.  My land has attracted help like a magnet. All I have to do is let people share my dreams and they contribute time and more importantly local knowledge and forestry expertise.  Sophisticated people say that people like me are naïve, maybe so.  I believe in win-win outcomes and I don’t care if it sounds cliché. The secret of joy is finding ways to give people what they want in the framework of what you want. I don’t know if I get as much as I could, but I am morally certain that I get more than I would in other ways. I find that in my forestry, I find it in my work and I find it generally in life.

I just could not do forestry the way I want to do it w/o all the help I get.  It would be simply impossible.  They get to use my land, but they use it in ways that I want it to be used. What is important to me is that my trees are growing robustly; the water that runs off the land is crystal clear; the soil is getting better; wildlife abounds. I get to watch the trees grow as long as I live and leave it to the kids after I die.  Is there anything else anybody could reasonably want? Maybe a horse when I get to old to walk around comfortably.  Mariza can teach me to ride it.

The Nature Conservancy uses fire well in its ecosystem management.  Here is a link to a good article.

A good article about fire in southern forests is here.

Also check out the Southern Fire Exchange.

I took the Virginia fire course a couple years ago, so I am officially “qualified” to set fire to the woods. Of course, I wouldn’t dare do it w/o somebody with boots on the ground experience. Information about using fire in forestry is below. 

Burn the Brush but Save the Soils
Burning Questions
Setting the Woods on Fire
Environmental Footprints v Real Progress

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Where There’s Fire, There’s Smoke

I don’t mind the dry air, but the smoke is starting to get difficult.  The rains will come in a few weeks.  Until then, this is not the best time to be in Brasilia.

I am not unsympathetic to using fire as a management tool. I understand that it is crucial to the cerrado ecosystem. But most of the fires set around here are not good management. They are either too hot and destroy too much or not well done so as to be ineffective. Most of the fires, in fact, seem to be garbage fires that got out of hand and/or much of the smoke comes from actual garbage fires, which do nobody any good. Using fire as a tool is not the same as using it as a convenience.

We saw lots of fires on our way up to Chapada dos Veadeiros and you can see the effects of fire in the national park.  The rocks are black. The guide said that they get a natural black patina and that it is not the result of fires.  I don’t believe that.  I know that the guide has been there all his life and I don’t want to oppose his local knowledge, but it is probably true that this place has been burned over all that time. I remember the black “cream city brick” in Milwaukee. Cream city brick is a kind of yellowish white color in its natural form, but the porous nature of the brick surface turned it black when exposed to the constant coal smoke. Not all brick was equally blackened.  When the air was cleaned up in the 1970s, the cream city brick again looked creamy.  I think the same thing happens to these black rocks. They soak up the carbon black and never get clean. Different sorts of rocks absorb more than others, as in the rocks above.  

“Natural” fires would have been rare, since lightning to start those fires would tend to come with thunderstorms during the wet season, which would limit their extent. But with the arrival of man many thousands of years ago, fires during the dry season changed the landscapes. Native Brazilians set fires, just as native North Americans and there has not been a “natural” landscape here since.

I learned in my fire class (I am certified as a fire manager by the State of Virginia) that fires that are too hot or too frequent destroy natural diversity, since only a few species can take the stress.  On the other hand, places where fire never comes also lose diversity, since a few species come to dominate. I wrote a post about how fires work at this link. A proper fire regime produces greater variety and a robust ecosystem. The problem is knowing how much is enough and how much is too much.  It also requires setting priorities.  Land managers must make choices, which some a loath to do.  They want to default to the “natural” option. Unfortunately, there is no natural option, only a variety of different choices for human management. Do we take it back to 1500?  The landscape at that time was already altered by the native populations. Do we guess at what it must have been before humans? Of course, we cannot restore all the species.  Or do we manage for diversity, productivity and robustness?  This would be my option.  

Anyway, fire can be used well or poorly. All fire will produce smoke, but there are better ways of smoke management. A well designed fire will consume much of its own smoke and will not smolder for a very long time.

The picture at top is a fire by the side of Goias 118. I don’t think it was a “managed” fire, but you can see by the direction of the flames that it is a backing fire, i.e. it is burning in the direction away from the wind. This produces a cooler fire, not as destructive to the plant life. I wrote a post about this when I was taking the fire class. It is at this link.  You can see the burned over area in the side mirror. Next picture shows some fields on fire. The blackish rocks are below. The plants in the next picture are burned but not killed. Last is a typical Goias landscape as you get near the hills.

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Setting the Woods on Fire

I am in Charlottesville for the prescribed burning course sponsored by Virginia Department of Forestry.   It has given me a lot to think about.   I am entering the various threads as separate posts.   (BTW –  I used to come to Charlottesville to visit Mariza when she was at UVA.  Now that Mariza is graduated it is the same, but different and a bit lonely.)

The Science of Forestry

When you try to change any single thing, you find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”  John Muir.

Below is the view from the forestry building in Charlottesville.  It was cold, but no wind, as you can see from the flags.

Forestry is probably the most scientific of all the environmental fields in that it is one of the only ones where people with boots on the ground actually do something like controlled experiments.   They usually take a long time to get real results.   Time is needed to let all the various small connections and causes to be manifest and many times unobvious factors are the real drivers of the process.  But the time lag and complex causality usually revealed mean that forestry is usually behind the curve on the big news scares and hopes.  The news media has moved along to the next crisis by the time the forest science comes in. 

For example, we only recently got the word on acid rain.   You remember acid rain?    It was a big deal during the 1990s.  It threatened to destroy many of the trees in our Eastern forests.  I admit that I got a little hysterical about that prospect and there was indeed a serious problem with sulfur dioxide etc emitted by coal fired power plants.  We addressed the coal/acid rain problem with a cap and trade program.  It worked well enough that it is one of the great environmental success stories that we mostly have forgotten about.   (BTW – the things that worry me more are invasive species.  In my lifetime and those of my children, this problem will impact our forests more than global warming or acid rain or almost anything else I can think of, but that subject seems to get only local traction.)

But much of the acid rain hysteria was misdirected.  There was a lot written about lakes and streams that were too acid to allow fish to survive.   This was true.  Acid rain, however, was not the most important cause of this.   The root problem was change in land use and the ultimate irony was that acidification of lakes and streams was related to the ostensibly good factor of re-growth of forests and the prevention of forest fires.   Until the early part of the 20th Century, burning was very common in Eastern forests.   When burning virtually stopped, this changed and so did the chemistry of lakes within the forests. 

Fires change the chemistry of the streams and lakes in the forests by changing the chemistry of what runs off the land.  Everything is a trade off.  The fires burn away the C and N but the remaining ash and silt that pollutes the water also raises the pH.   If you stop burning the forests on the shores and/or they grow back thickly, the pH of the nearby lakes drops (i.e. they become more acidic) because the surrounding soils are naturally acidic.  Burning has always been part of N American ecology and the more frequent burning has been a factor ever since humans brought fire making skills to the new world.   Until recently, that is.  The forests in the Eastern United States are thicker than they have been at any time since the Native Americans “immigrated” from Asia and altered the landscape with regular burning.   When we talk about restoring the natural environments, BTW, we are usually talking about restoration to the pre-1607 levels, not the pre-human levels.    This makes sense.   It would be too hard to figure out what the “original landscape” was like, anyway.   That was a couple of ice ages ago.  Who knows?

Forestry, being a practical science, can analyze the problem practically and propose practical solutions.   Change what you have on the land and how you manage it and you change other results.  Everything is connected to everything else, often in unexpected ways.  If you want to raise the pH of land or lakes, you can do that by changing land use.  Controlled burning can help.  Or you can apply lime.   We did that when we established our wildlife plots because the soil was too (naturally) sour.   You can do the same with water, at least smaller bodies.

Land use is a really important factor.  In fact, it is often so big that we overlook it.  I also think land use issues are a little too diverse and prosaic to attract the sustained attention of the media and the public would prefer to turn a blind eye since almost everybody is complicit in this problem.   It is more fun to blame big industrialists or feckless government than to change your own habits and aspirations.