The High Sierra forest is dying, and you can't count the loss in dead trees

Re:The High Sierra forest is dying, and you can't count the ... by korethr on Thursday October 06, 2016 @03:22PM (#12655289)

I find it odd that the fire scars from a few years back are still black. Many years ago I was doing some volunteer work with my father here in Colorado, running donated supplies up to the base camps of the firefighters working an active fire. On the drive up, we passed through areas previously burned by the fire, I want to say a couple weeks earlier, and you could see new plants sprouting up everywhere. It seems to me that fire fertilized the soil and made room for new plants to start growing.

I was of the understanding that fires are a healthy thing for a forest, though I must admit that it's been decades since I've lived in California, and that the local climates and ecologies are quite different.

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Re:The High Sierra forest is dying, and you can't count the ... by greeneggs on Thursday October 06, 2016 @04:17PM (#12655732)

There's a theory that decades of wildfire suppression have led to a buildup of material, so that when fires occur now they are much more severe than they would otherwise have been. These hotter fires kill a lot more, and are harder to recover from. [0, 1]

> "Historically, fires operated in a way that tended to be less severe in valley bottoms and lower slopes," Taylor added. "Now, because of fire suppression, they tend to burn at a higher severity and you lose that habitat." The practice of not allowing any fires means that more leaf litter and branches—the components of forest fuel—can accumulate on the floor, while small trees that would have burned in the past can grow large enough to carry fires into the crowns of the taller trees that had escaped the impact of less severe fires in the past, putting the landscape in jeopardy. [0]

[0] http://news.psu.edu/story/270206/2013/03/26/research/suppres... [1] http://snamp.cnr.berkeley.edu/static/documents/2012/06/13/St...

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Re:The High Sierra forest is dying, and you can't count the ... by blakes on Thursday October 06, 2016 @04:51PM (#12655994)

I worked at the Forestry department at a major university for a while (in IT), but I heard that same thing from all of the professors and staff there. It's less a theory and more of a fact. It is more often better to let the forest fire burn than to try and contain it.

The people at that department are doing some incredible research like mapping forest floors from drones/airplanes with radar.

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Re:The High Sierra forest is dying, and you can't count the ... by Amezarak on Thursday October 06, 2016 @07:24PM (#12656958)

I live in the southeast, and the forest service does controlled burns all the time instead of fire suppression and, granted there's a huge climate difference, but it works well.

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Re:The High Sierra forest is dying, and you can't count the ... by npsimons on Thursday October 06, 2016 @03:31PM (#12655351)

At least at higher altitudes, things decay and grow a lot slower. This is why you will see signs forbidding campfires above certain elevations and also why you have to pack out excrement in many places.

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Re:The High Sierra forest is dying, and you can't count the ... by pvaldes on Friday October 07, 2016 @08:24AM (#12660065)

It depends.

There are some scientists talking about some newly discovered effects on soil by fireforests. There are two types of ashes after a fireforest: White and Black. White cinders are completely burned. Can be permeated by rain and contain minerals and nutrients easily taken by plants. Black ashes are incompletedly burned and have instead an hydrophobic efect. They make the soil reject the new water. Soil turns into a brick and water can now only move trough crevices, (unavailable to the other "90%" of the soil for months or years).

So, fireforests can be good, but there are some undesired collateral effects also. A better way would be that some people stop deliberately creating fireforests for profit, and I'm not talking about environmental managers here.

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