[pct-l] Re: Forests Fires Study

[Lonetrail at aol.com (Lonetrail@xxxxxxx)]

> July 23, I got this from the New York Times. 
> 
> 
> How a Forest Stopped a Fire in Its Tracks
> 
> By JAMES GORMAN
> 
> 
> USANVILLE, Calif. ? Where the fire came through Blacks Mountain Experimental 
> Forest last September, the ground is ash and the trees are charcoal. Black 
> and gray are the colors, lightened only by small mounds of red dust at the 
> base of some of the charred trunks ? the leavings of bark beetles ? and flecks 
> of green where new growth pokes above the ash.
> 
> Through the tall, ravaged columns, however, a living pine forest is visible. 
> And as visitors inspecting the fire damage walk toward the living forest, 
> they come to an abrupt transition. 
> 
> September's blaze was named the Cone Fire, for the hill where it was first 
> thought to have begun. It burned 2,000 acres of Lassen National Forest, and 
> 1,600 of those were in Blacks Mountain Experimental Forest, a 10,000-acre area 
> within Lassen set up in 1934 for ecological study by the Forest Service. 
> 
> When the Cone Fire swept through these woods it came to a patch of forest 
> that was different from the rest, and stopped dead, like a mime at an invisible 
> wall. What stopped the fire was an experimental plot that had been 
> selectively logged to thin it, and had been burned in controlled fashion. The result 
> was an open forest, much the way it might have been 500 years ago when regular 
> forest fires swept through the high dry country and no one tried to stop 
> them.
> 
> "It just stopped," Carl N. Skinner said, looking satisfied but almost 
> surprised. Mr. Skinner, a geographer with the Forest Service at the Redding 
> Silviculture Laboratory in Redding, Calif., and Dr. Steve Zack, a conservation 
> scientist with the North American Program of the Wildlife Conservation Society, 
> along with other Forest Service colleagues, are showing a reporter the results 
> of an accidental experiment that still impresses them each time they visit 
> it.
> 
> "Night and day," Dr. Zack said.
> 
> "If we hadn't treated this it would have just blown right through this 
> area," Mr. Skinner said. 
> 
> The members of the group are part of a cooperative research project 
> involving different parts of the Forest Service and the Wildlife Conservation 
> Society.
> 
> The researchers have been trying different forest management plans on 12 
> 250-acre research plots for about seven years. The point was never to find out 
> how best to stop fires. Instead the research was meant to develop a general 
> picture of how different management techniques affect forest ecosystems.
> 
> In the past, many forests were either cut down for timber or left alone. A 
> century of fire suppression resulted in the accumulated underbrush and thick 
> tree growth that can fuel catastrophic wildfires. Parts of Blacks Mountain and 
> the surrounding Lassen National Forest have had enough time to grow thick 
> and brushy. 
> 
> In the experimental plots, some were selectively logged, either to remove 
> bigger trees, to mimic one lucrative logging approach, or to leave a wide range 
> of tree sizes. The plots that had the large trees removed were so-called low 
> diversity plots.
> 
> "So much of this kind of forest has had the large trees removed over the 
> years," Mr. Skinner said, and now "we have very dense forests that need thinning 
> now from a fire hazard perspective. This is what many of them are going to 
> end up looking like."
> 
> Other plots were both thinned and subjected to prescribed burns ? fires set 
> by the researchers, a management policy that is followed in many national 
> forests.
> 
> Finally, some areas were subjected to prescribed burns only. The researchers 
> ? fire ecologists, wildlife specialists, botanists ? have followed the 
> changes in plant growth, tree growth and wildlife populations in all the 
> different situations.
> 
> Ponderosa pine forests are no strangers to fire. Mr. Skinner has taken 
> samples of trees up to 700 years old to find out their fire history. Most trees 
> showed evidence of some sort of fire about every 7 to 10 years. And big, 
> intense fires occurred every 20 years or so, up until a century ago when the idea 
> of fighting forest fires took hold. 
> 
> Once the natural fires were stopped, Dr. Zack said, the Ponderosa and 
> Jeffrey pine forests from Baja California to British Columbia grew thick. 
> Underbrush, fallen limbs and dry needles accumulated to make fuel to feed fires that 
> would consume the large trees and destroy whole stands of timber.
> 
> When the Cone Fire hit, it created a controlled experiment on how different 
> management techniques, at least in this area, affected a big forest fire.
> 
> The results are clear to the naked eye. The fire started in an area where 
> the woods were thick, and quickly became intense enough to consume the woods 
> that it went through. It was blown south and west, but it was turned away first 
> by a mechanically thinned plot, which it scorched before dying out, and then 
> by a plot that had been subjected to thinning and prescribed burning. The 
> fire did not penetrate that patch at all. 
> 
> In the thinned area that had no controlled burn, Mr. Skinner pointed to the 
> effects of the Cone Fire. "We definitely changed the fire behavior and made 
> it so the fire dropped to the ground and made it so that from a point of view 
> of putting out fires it's easier to put out," he said, "but still there's 
> sufficient fuel here to cause a lot more damage to the stand that was left 
> here."
> 
> Doing controlled burns, with no thinning, worked better. But the best of all 
> was a combination of thinning and controlled burns. The stands of 
> moderate-size trees, what the researchers call "low diversity," stopped the fire cold.
> 
> The high diversity stands, which included more large trees, showed some 
> scorching for 30 yards or so, as the fire burned the needle bed that had 
> accumulated over five years since the last controlled burn. Then the fire died out.
> 
> Dr. Scott Stephens, director of the Stephens Laboratory for Wildland Fire 
> Science at the University of California at Berkeley, has been to Blacks 
> Mountain Forest and seen what happened when the Cone Fire hit. He said in an 
> interview that this kind of accidental research with rigorous data was very rare.
> 
> He would have predicted, he said, that thinning and burning together would 
> stop a fire, but was surprised that the plots that were thinned but not burned 
> survived as well as they did. Many trees died, but enough lived for the 
> stand to recover.
> 
> The key, he said, was that when the small trees were cut, they were 
> completely removed, rather than leaving remnants on the forest floor, as was done 
> with the larger trees. That reduced the fuel on the ground. 
> 
> "It really points to surface fuel reduction," he said, as the most important 
> step to prevent big fires. 
> 
> Dr. Stephens said the Bush administration's current Healthy Forest 
> Initiative was mainly about reducing regulation and does not specify fire management 
> regimens. He also said he thought that not enough emphasis in the initiative 
> was placed on reducing surface fuels by prescribed burning or other means. 
> Whether large trees were removed or left made a big difference for wildlife, Dr. 
> Zack said. Large trees, and large dead trees, are attractive to woodpeckers 
> and other creatures.
> 
> Although prescribed burns are common, they are also controversial, partly 
> because of a fire in New Mexico in 2000 that destroyed 200 buildings in Los 
> Alamos, leaving hundreds of people homeless. That fire resulted from a 
> prescribed burn by the National Park Service that got out of control.
> 
> Cost is also an issue. In plots where large trees were removed, timber sales 
> were lucrative enough that the net gain was $1,400 an acre. Where only 
> smaller trees were cut, the Forest Service suffered a net loss of $200 an acre.
> 
> Dr. Zack and Mr. Skinner and their colleagues agree that no single panacea 
> will solve the problems resulting from a century of fire suppression. Still, 
> they can point to the evidence on the ground, where you can stand on a line 
> between charred trees and healthy ones.

Lonetrail

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