Cafeoutdoors.com: Hellbender

and another one since you have no brain

"Eliminating Forests
September 29th, 2007

The proposition is oft stated that catastrophic fires are good for our forests. The reasons given are that fire is ?natural? and inevitable, that the forest trees and plants are adapted to fire, and even ?dependent? on fire, and that fire ?rejuvenates? the forest.

That proposition lacks nuance. No two fires are alike. Fire A is not Fire B. No two forests are alike, either. Conditions vary, phenomena vary, and effects vary. The outcomes of catastrophic fire are not random, however, although they do have some elements of chaos.

Chaos is a pre-deterministic pattern disruption. That is, the outcomes depend on initial conditions.

Given the initial conditions of a fuel-laden, thicket-type forest, catastrophic fire has a tendency to largely eliminate that forest from the landscape, and replace it with a different ecosystem. The new ecosystem develops new patterns, determined by slope, soil, exposure, etc., but almost invariably the new ecosystem does not have trees.

Modern catastrophic forest fires kill all the trees. Young and old-growth trees alike succumb in the intense heat. Modern fires also sear away the shrub and herbaceous layers, and leave a carpet of ash and charcoal, with patches of exposed mineral soil. No living biomass remains above ground.

Occasional patches of green trees remain after catastrophic fires, sometimes in deep canyons and sometimes on ridge tops. Forest fires create their own cyclonic winds, and chaotic burn-skips can and do occur in odd patterns. Often the ?surviving? trees die from beetle attack and fungal diseases soon after the fire, such infestations brought about by the massive sudden mortality in the adjacent burned zones.

Modern catastrophic forest fires do not leave a ?mosaic? of ?patches?. Modern fires are more like continuous, vast inkblots or spreading rashes that consume all the vegetation in amoeba-like patterns with lobes, bulges, and arms.

Furthermore, if unburned patches remain inside fire perimeters, it is the practice to have fire crews burn them out, deliberately, as part of mop-up operations. This is typically done as a safety measure in early season fires to prevent flare-ups later on in the summer. But the upshot is that any ?mosaic tiles? of a few green spots inside the amoeba-like fire perimeter are eliminated by fire crews before the beetles and fungus can get to them.

New forests do not arise across the vast, 100-percent-mortality burns. Instead grasses and weedy annuals invade. Sprouting shrubs, whose root systems were insulated deep in the soil, struggle for growing space, sunlight, and especially soil moisture with the grasses and weeds.

Few conifers stump-sprout, and none of our inland forest species do. Pines, firs, and spruces propagate by seed. Modern catastrophic fires burn so severely that soils are baked and seed banks are destroyed. Any lucky conifer seeds that survive and subsequently germinate must compete with grasses, weeds, and well-rooted shrubs. And the few conifers that make it to 15-50 years-of-age will be incinerated in the next catastrophic fire, which will likely be classed as a brush fire, not a forest fire.

Take Mann Gulch, for example. In 1949 a forested canyon on the Missouri River 20 miles north of Helena burned in the fire that also killed 13 firefighters. In his famous book about the Mann Gulch Fire, Young Men And Fire, author Norman Maclean doesn?t discuss the vegetation much. There is this passage, however:

In the formal description of the Report of Board of Review:? At the point of origin of the fire the fuel type consisted of a dense stand of six- to eight-inch Douglas fir and some ponderosa pine on the lateral ridges.?

But it was a different type of fuel on the north side, where the crew was now on its way to the river. ?At the point of disaster the tree cover consisted of stringers of scattered young ponderosa pine trees with occasional overmature ponderosa pine trees. The ground cover or understory which predominated was bunch grass with some cheat grass.? Essentially the north side of Mann Gulch was rocky and steep with a lot of grass and brush and only a scattering of trees. The south side was densely timbered.

Maclean?s photos bear out his descriptions of Mann Gulch. Some were agency photos taken before the Mann Gulch Fire, some immediately after, and some twenty years later. The post-fire photos clearly show pine trees killed by the fire. The pictures from 1969 show no living trees. Maclean had this to say after he visited the site in the 1980?s:

Now, almost forty years later, small trees have just started to grow along the bottoms of dry finger gulches on the hillside in Mann Gulch, where moisture from rain and snow are retained underground. Since even now these little evergreens are only six to eight inches high, the grass has to be parted to find them?

This summer, 58 years later, Mann Gulch burned again (see here). Whatever tiny trees had survived from the 1980?s were fried. What was once forested is now de-treed permanently. The canyon adjacent to Mann Gulch, Meriwether Canyon, was not burned in 1949 but did burn this summer. The dense thicket of ponderosa pine and Douglas-fir cooked completely, as if Meriwether Canyon had been a giant pottery kiln.

Meriwether Canyon will not recover to be forest again, any more than Mann Gulch did. Nor will the areas burned this summer along the Rocky Mountain Front. Nor will the 1,200 square mile region of the Idaho Batholith roasted this summer by catastrophic forest fires. Nor will the 500,000 acre Biscuit Burn in Southwest Oregon. Nor will the bulk of the former Kaibab ponderosa pine forest. Nor will the Deschutes, Okanogan, Las Padres, or a dozen other National Forests visited by megafires in recent years.

Those forests have been eliminated and replaced by fire-type brush. The idea that our forests arose from catastrophic ?stand-replacing? fires is not true. They didn?t arise in that manner, certainly not the forests with (or that had) old-growth trees in them. Old-growth trees can be found across the entire West. Forests with old trees didn?t arise from catastrophic 100-percent-mortality fires. They couldn?t have. The evidence of Mann Gulch and other modern burns is plain to see.

Despite the obvious and clear evidence, the old myths persist. Many people feel a desperate need to perpetuate fanciful tales of forest development based on doofy pseudo-ecology. We offer, for example, this piece of pro-fire cheerleading replete with happy talk that lacks scientific merit (here).

Life After Meriwether

By LARRY KLINE, Helena Independent Record Staff Writer - 08/19/07

? Some areas now are home to black trunks standing in a moonscape of ash and gaping root holes, their heat-deformed branches curled to the sky. The soil is topped with dead ashes. Streaks and circles of white are all that remain of logs or bushes incinerated by the heat.

But in some places just 50 yards separate these apocalyptic scenes from living trees and flowering brush. The soil is dark and able to support new life. Living roots still can be found beneath black stubs of burnt scrub grass.

Some spots already are home to fresh green shoots.

This mosaic is exactly what forest managers expect after this sort of fire.

Fuel buildups in high elevations mean fires there, though infrequent, typically replace whole stands of Douglas fir.

?It?s pretty impressive how much stand replacement occurred with that fire,? Helena National Forest ecologist Lois Olsen said. She?s working on the incident management team, and recently flew over the burned areas.

?There are large patches that don?t have any living trees in them right now,? she said. Other areas are still green, she added.

?I don?t know that this is anything that you would consider abnormal,? Olsen said.

Much of the interior of the area is dominated by Douglas fir, with ponderosa pine taking over in the lower elevations at the edge of the wilderness.

Under what forest managers call a ?natural fire regime,? frequent, variable-intensity burns will leave open stands of mature ponderosa pine. The fires leave gaps in stands of Douglas fir.

The forest was ponderosa pine, open and park-like and maintained by frequent, regular, seasonal anthropogenic fire. After the Indian residents were murdered or moved, Douglas-fir invaded, as well as a thicket of young ponderosas.

The reporter had that backwards. He said the pine was ?taking over? in the lower elevations. In fact, the pine is (was) dying out, being replaced by Douglas-fir in the absence of tending, human-set fire. The gosh darn twaddle about ?natural fire regimes? is historically, ecologically, and factually inaccurate, and so egregiously so that one hopes someone else would please hit that moron with a shovel.

First the journalist (there?s a thinly-veiled insult) said fires typically replace whole stands, then he said they leave open stands of ponderosa pine. Which is it? Can?t be both. We get cognitive dissonance syndrome from reading jabber like that. It causes us to pick up our shovel and take some practice swings.

The reporter called the burn a ?mosaic,? but the USFS ecologist called the 100-percent-mortality area ?pretty impressive? and referred to the burn as ?stand replacement?. We don?t think the reporter had a freaking clue, however, so we cannot rely on his quoting of anybody and have never spoken to Lois Olsen ourselves. We do believe the reporter, however, when he said he witnessed grass and weeds sprouting. That is reasonable. He did not and will not see any trees growing there again though, of that we are sure.

Meriwether Canyon has been roasted and its forest eliminated. Go take a look, without a journalist to interpret things for you. Catastrophic fires in thicket-type forests eliminate forests and replace them with something else.

Our forests are being extincted, not rejuvenated. That?s the bottom line and the reality of the situation."

I now know why you left the west, though, you couldn't hack it.