So ideally for a forest you would have small fires come through regularly and clean up the under brush but leave a fair number of large mature trees standing leading to open fire resistant mature forest.
With these large super destructive fires that wipe out everything you get slower reseeding which can let invasives weeds take hold. And you get dense stands of young trees and brush which are less fire resistant than mature forests.
Partial solutions include controlled burns in the wet season and thinning where you shoot to leave the large mature trees but reduce fuels. (This isn't always commercially viable though developing wood products that can be made from small trees or even brush harvested during thinning is an interesting area.)
If you're real unlucky an above average wet season after a super destructive fire will cause untold amounts of topsoil erosion and damage, impacting the follow on reseeding even more.
What has changed is that the fires burn hotter and so fully destroy vegetation and even seeds with intense heat which makes it much harder for the forests to regrow in the way they typically would in a "fire adapted ecosystem": https://www.cpr.org/2020/09/01/colorado-wildfires-forests-re...
In Australia it is only now becoming widely understood that stopping of the indigenous peoples burning of the bush has lead to an increase not only of large destructive bushfires but also a changing of the nature of the plants growing in an area. We are seeing more weeds and certainly more fire prone species which is leading in turn to an increase in the flammable fuel load. With the widespread 2020 bushfires causing so much destruction there has been an increase in appetite for looking at other options for land management, including trying to tap the fading knowledge of the indigenous elders on there traditional practice.
Denser forests are more prone to it though, they'll thin impacted forest to try and keep as many trees as they can.
Ironically, if topsoil isn't sterilised or washed away, and both can and do happen with the mega fires we've been seeing, fresh growth after a wildfire can be stunningly quick.
A mature forest is self-limited by the existing mature growth --- juvenile trees simply cannot get sufficient light. If mature growth is cleared, the juveniles grow quickly.
It's still a slow process, and we're talking about ~30--50 years for a redwood to hit 100' or so (coast redwoods can grow to over 380' / 115m, giant sequoia are more massive but not quite so tall --- 286' / 87m.
As carbon sinks, redwood, doug fir, ponderosa, and other trees common to the western coastal ranges, Sierra, and Cascades are not insignificant, but probably pale compared to bogs, swamps, wetlands, mangroves, and tropical rainforests. Thats' a general sense, though I don't have solid numbers at hand.
Burning down the Sierra, Cascades, and Rockies isn't going to do us any favours. But it's still relatively modest. I'd be more concerned about tundra / permafrost melting and release, bog fires, wetlands loss, and rainforest.
Unfortunately we'll likely see all of that as well.
Thanks for the free education :)
Yes, at least without human intervention. The stress concept in ecology predicts more biodiversity at minor events, but much less at large-scale global events. A pinch of disturbance is good for the life beings. This levels of disturbance at the same time in the North and in Brazil are not good.
It was only a few years back the melting of the tundra was identified as 'accelerating effect' of climate change, as that thawing permafrost releases its methane into the atmosphere.
Fire needs three things. One of them is fuel. The west coast has an abundance of fuel because for generations we have prevented fires from removing it. If we stop doing that or the fires are too overwhelming to manage the fuel will go away and the problem will solve itself. It will just be way more fiery because you're compressing say 100yr worth of fuel consumption into say a decade.
Not a lot, all.
The ecosystem is changing towards the desert side. Forests need a minimum amount of water to sustain them. Could be replaced by arid forests, made to burn. But the humid forests will disappear or became relict. Is happening in California since several years ago.
It seems it would be simple to set up in a lab conditions that would be favorable for a cloud seeding mission in the real world (conditions where the air is moist but not precipitating). Insert the silver iodide and see how much of the water in the air condenses. Multiply it out to see how much silver iodide you would need to substantially increase rain. Test in different conditions to see the operating window for cloud seeding is.
It should be noted that the benefit of cloud seeding is not necessarily increasing total rainfall in a region, but controlling where that rainfall occurs.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2021/07/21/cloud-s...
https://www.newsweek.com/dubai-creates-fake-rain-using-drone...
At least until the fuel is gone. If we don't overcome forest management practices like fire suppression, the ecosystem will simply turn over to something less vulnerable to fire. To your point it won't be the existing species like Doug Fir, Live Oak, or Jeffrey Pine.
There is, though. Climate change has different impacts depending on where you are. Some areas are rising in temperature much much faster than others. The arctic is a good example of 'local global warming'.
> I'd be very surprised if the feedback effect is at all significant
Prepare to be surprised. Even if there are 1000 factors each of them only contributing .1% to the total, it is still the case that each one of the 1000 factors is significant.
[1] https://nature.berkeley.edu/stephenslab/wp-content/uploads/2...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_wildfires
Edit: clarity
That said, even high intensity fires have pretty impressive recovery. Do you want to give me a high intensity fire from 5+ years ago? I can then show you the recovery if you want.
An eye-witness account of smoke in northern California forests (C.H. Merriam 1898, quoted in Morford, 1993) reported ‘‘Of the hundreds of persons who visit the Pacific slope in California every summer to see the mountains, few see more than the immediate foreground and a haze of smoke which even the strongest glass is unable to penetrate.’’ C.H. Merriam traveled extensively in California and was Chief, Division of Biological Survey for the US.
I've seen estimates of everything burned every 5 years which I found credible.
Or this on use by native americans
“Fire was a constant companion, a kind of universal catalyst and technology,” says Stephen Pyne, an emeritus professor at Arizona State University, author and fire historian.
Yosemite itself was routinely burned to clear underbrush, open pasture lands, provide nutrient-rich forage for deer, and to support the growth of woodland food crops to feed and sustain what was once a large and thriving indigenous population.
https://www.history.com/news/native-american-wildfires
A lot of the hot takes about the amount of fire we have no ignore the real issue - too little fire in landscapes that historically were shaped (and need) fire. And no - fire does not destroy nature - though I've seen some Instagram posts of folks rushing into burned areas to get clicks and good shots. Seriously - come back in 1-2 years and be amazed in many cases.
Fire was 101 land management "technology" and indigenous populations used it over literally thousands of years to improve their environment.
> That runaway feedback is the dangerous part.
This is the second year I've heard the term pyrocumulus/pyrocumulonimbus so prominently in relation to the Sierras in California. If this happens more frequently, we might lose a lot of forest. It seems like that would accelerate the effects of climate change... which would also amplify the frequency of these events.