Frost, Ric, Casey Roberts, Garrett Hyatt, John Fowler. 2007. Montane Meadow and Open Area Encroachment in the Lincoln Forest, Sacramento Grazing Allotment. New Mexico State Univ. Cooperative Extension Service/Agricultural Experiment Station, Range Improvement Task Force, Report 69.
Full text [here] (12,952 KB)
and
Frost, Ric. 2007. Just One Match - An Easy Way To Destroy New Mexico. Range Magazine, Spring 2007.
Full text [here] (329 KB)
The second paper is a “popular” version of the first for lay readers, although both are very good and not too technical for most people.
Selected excerpts from “Just One Match“:
It is amazing how much fire one match can cause. Back in the year 2000, one match ignited the infamous Cerro Grande fire by Los Alamos, N.M. This same fire “ignited” an indepth study of Southwestern forest conditions by the state university. This report reveals that the Cerro Grande, Scott-Able, Viveash and several other fires on government lands that same season destroyed approximately 689 square miles of habitat in New Mexico.
The report points out that the intensity of the catastrophic habitat-destroying fires was a direct result of the fuel-load biomass levels created by the Mexican spotted owl environmental lawsuit. Logging restrictions were imposed on government-controlled lands. The study reveals that U.S. Forest Service-controlled lands in New Mexico forests alone had accumulated approximately 1.4 billion board feet of fuel-load biomass buildup between the years 1986 to 1999, as logging declined 82.4 percent during the same period. …
All of the Mexican spotted owl habitat in the Los Alamos area and the owl-nesting protected locations were lost, as were many of the ground-dwelling endangered species. Other endangered and protected habitat areas were also seriously compromised or destroyed by these fires.
The report also points out the loss of an entire cultural timber-harvesting infrastructure due to owl restrictions and the resulting loss of the economic sector to rural communities in the hundreds of millions of dollars. This is in addition to the costs of fire fighting, the personal costs and loss of homes (including the threat to the Los Alamos nuclear facilities in the path of the Cerro Grande fire), as well as the human lives lost as a result of these fires. It is doubtful that the families who lost everything were concerned over the the loss of a few birds.
Read more
April 7, 2008 | Comments Off | Topic: Management, Ecology
by Mike Dubrasich
The horrendous megafires that are punishing our landscapes arise in what many call “late successional stands”. Government vegetation maps indicate that the most fire-prone areas are designated late successional. The government has incorporated the term late successional into our legal system. It is a land use class, much as commercial, industrial, or residential zones are designated on urban zoning maps.
Many forest scientists maintain that late succession is some sort of ecological state or condition. And not just any condition; late succession is the cat’s meow, the most treasured condition that forests can attain. We have shut down and locked up tens of millions of acres of our public forests because they are or soon will be (we hope) late successional. Nobody talks about old-growth anymore; the term of art is late successional.
It therefore behooves us to try to figure out what the heck “forest succession” is and when it becomes “late.”
But that is a fool’s errand, because forest succession is itself a bogus concept.
Ideally, in the eco-babble dream world, forests begin as bare ground, totally seared to the dirt, with nothing alive above ground. First “pioneer” plant species move in, followed by “settler” species, and eventually “climax” species take over.
That’s succession, a gradual change in species, particularly tree species, until a stable, “climax community” of plants is established and sets there, unchanged, for the rest of time.
It is similar to the succession of kings to a throne. The first king named Henry is Henry I. When he dies, another king succeeds him. And then that king dies, and somebody else succeeds him. Eventually, if enough time passes, you might see another King Henry, and then another, all the way up to Henry the Eighth or even more. Of course, no king lives forever, so no climax stable kinghood ever comes about.
That’s true in nature, too, obviously. No tree lives forever. The theory of forest succession accounts for that: the individual trees may die, but the species eventually stop changing, and that is the climax state. Of course, eventually and inevitably another disturbance occurs, and then the whole successional parade starts over.
The problem with the theory of forest succession is that it does not occur in nature. It is a phenomenon that occurs only in the minds of dreamers. The real world is quite different than that.
February 20, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Ecology
Van Wagner, Charles E., Mark A. Finney, and Mark Heathcott. Historical Fire Cycles in the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks. Forest Science 52(6) 2006, (704-717).
Charles E. Van Wagner, Canadian Forest Service (ret.), Mark A. Finney, USDA Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station, Fire Sciences Laboratory, and Mark Heathcott, Parks Canada.
Full text [here]
Review by Mike Dubrasich
A remarkable and historic forest science paper was published last December in Forest Science, the leading US scientific journal about forest science. The paper is remarkable for a half dozen or more reasons, and in this essay we (attempt to) sort them out and explain them.
First, the authors are the cream of the crop. Charles E. Van Wagner is the unofficial dean of Canadian fire science. No one has advanced the science more, up there and few down here, during his lifetime. Finney and Heathcott are equally experienced grey beards of fire ecology. Hidden from direct view are dozens of field and laboratory researchers who contributed to the data collection for this paper, over a period of more than two decades.
Previous accounts of data collection and fire history have been published for all seven parks, some more than once. Jasper fire scar data were studied by Tande (1979a, b) but no formal reference exists for the whole-park age-class survey of 1987 to 1990. These data are on file at Jasper National Park; sampling work was begun by B. Wallace and G. Fenton, completed and mapped by S. Cornelsen, and finally compiled by R. Kubian. Fire history and age-class data for Banff National Park were reported by White (1985), Rogeau and Gilbride (1994), and Rogeau (1996); for Kootenay National Park by Masters (1990); for Yoho National Park by Tymstra (1991); for Peter Loughheed (formerly Kananaskis) Provincial Park of Alberta by Hawkes (1979, 1980), Johnson (1987), Johnson and Fryer (1987), and Johnson and Larsen (1991); for Mount Assiniboine and Spray Lakes Provincial Parks of Alberta by Rogeau (1994 a, b).
In addition, the authors acknowledge “Parks Canada for providing the data, and Ian Pengelly, Cliff White, and Stephen Woodley, all of Parks Canada, for helpful comment and interest.”
Historical Fire Cycles in the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks is about the fire history of seven contiguous national and provincial parks in the Canadian Rockies. They include Banff, Jasper, Kootenay, and others. Their combined total area is 21,900 sq. km., or 13,600 sq. miles. Of those, 6,300 sq. miles are forest, and the rest are rock, ice, water, or treeless vegetation.
No matter what units are used, that is a very large chunk of forest for a study, and one of the paper’s remarkable features. Another is that the study took over twenty years to complete and is the work of dozens of researchers. Another is that the fire dates they discovered go back to 1280 AD. To my knowledge, no other fire study has ever come close to the breadth of acreage and time comparable to Historical Fire Cycles in the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks.
Another remarkable feature is the principal finding of the study. Historically, forest fires in the Canadian Rockies have not been controlled by climate or random chance. Van Wagner et al. disproved those hypotheses, with an intensive yet elegant work of deductive science.
December 12, 2007 | Comments Off | Topic: Ecology
By Stephen J. Pyne
Originally published in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment 11.2 (Summer 2004) [here] by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment.
Full text [here]
Selected excerpts:
There are five of us, plus three pack horses, and we are strung along a trail that threads into Banff National Park. Banff is to the Rocky Mountains what the Grand Canyon is to the Colorado Plateau. A packtrip through its knotted peaks is the equivalent of a float trip down the Colorado River. We enter the park along the Red Deer River in the northeast.
Its critics dismiss Banff as a trash park-savaged by transcontinental highways and a railroad, the Bow Valley in particular deflowered by golf courses, ski resorts, swarms of tourists, a hydropower dam, its landscape degraded beyond redemption. In the mid-1990s Banff was even threatened with delisting as a World Heritage Site. Its defenders, however, note that the park has preserved nearly all its biotic pieces and holds intact its majestic matrix of streams, forests, storms, and slashing peaks. It yet retains its grizzlies, wolves, mountain lions; its elk, moose, bighorn sheep, mountain goats; a monumental megafauna to match its monumental scenery. Most spectacularly, nearly alone among Canadian parks, and rarely for North America, Banff has nurtured a habitat for free-burning fire.
A pack trip is thus a traverse through some of the most interesting fire management in North America. Banff is Canada’s first national park; a century later it had become for Parks Canada the flagship for an aggressive policy of ecological integrity for which free-burning fire was the vital spark. Ecological integrity aims to keep all the parts and processes of a biota and to grant them a suitable structure so that they can maintain themselves indefinitely. It contrasts with other preservationist philosophies by ignoring such standards as naturalness, wilderness, or historical authenticity, which may or may not contribute to the perpetuation of species and how they live. A policy such as Banff’s is, as postmodernists like to mutter, a contested matter.
All the themes are here: Banff is where they arose and where the relevant ideas took to the field to decide the issue. That makes Banff typical, or prototypical. What makes it special is that ecological integrity can apply to any landscape; at Banff it applies to an extraordinary menagerie of big animals and the habitats that sustain them. Fire matters because fire seems to be essential to those habitats. Ecological integrity may only succeed if Banff burns. The trick is to see that it burns properly. And that is the purpose for this curious expedition, an intellectual inspection…
December 11, 2007 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Management, Ecology
