Word: forest
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...many forest ecologists, manipulating fuel loads--whether by thinning, prescribed burning or a combination of the two--constitutes the best strategy we have for ensuring that the ponderosa pine forests of the present survive into the future. And the good news, says Mark Finney, a researcher with the U.S. Forest Service's Fire Sciences Laboratory in Missoula, Mont., is that it's probably not going to be necessary to thin or prescribe-burn every acre of forest at risk. According to mathematical models that Finney has developed, reducing fuels in a strategic pattern across a more manageable...
...modulate the behavior of big fires. One branch of the Hayman fire, for example, stopped at the edge of an area where a large prescribed burn had been conducted the year before, and the Rodeo-Chediski fire, for its part, was forced to detour around prescribed burns on forest lands managed by the White Mountain Apache tribe...
...prescribed fire at the Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico went off the reservation, igniting the blaze that swept into Los Alamos. Lost in the finger pointing that followed was the fact that the fire would probably not have proved so dangerous had fuel loads in the adjacent forest been lower. And this is precisely why thinning can be useful. As Arizona State University environmental historian Stephen Pyne sees it, thinning is just a tool for "re-creating a habitat for fire...
...attempting to thin lodgepole pine forests to prevent such blowups would be ludicrous, say scientists, for these seemingly catastrophic blazes serve important ecological functions. Among other things, lodgepole pine saplings do not flourish beneath the shade of mature trees and thus are dependent on fires to clear sun-filled openings. Moreover, many lodgepole pines package their seeds in resin-sealed cones that can be opened only by intense heat. "What you have to keep asking yourself is what range of fire frequency and severity a particular forest has experienced," says Tania Schoennagel, a University of Colorado researcher who studies postfire...
Thinning also seems of dubious merit in many mixed-severity fire regimes, except as a protective measure around the perimeter of communities. Consider, for example, the Biscuit fire that hopped and skipped across 500,000 acres in southern Oregon's Siskiyou National Forest last year. Slightly more than 15% of this rugged, geologically complex region was so seriously burned that virtually all the trees died. Around 65%, however, experienced fires of light and moderate severity, while some 20% escaped unscathed. Seed from areas where vegetation survived is already drifting into areas where vegetation was lost, and many important species--knobcone...