In 18 Years, Fire Has Utterly Changed NM Forests; Pine Forests Replaced, May Never Return
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Last year, for the second time in three years and the second time in history, more than 10 million acres burned nationwide. Federal land management agencies spent nearly $3 billion fighting fire, just 15 years after that figure first crested $1 billion. The total costs of rebuilding, including some of the 12,000 homes and structures destroyed last season, will likely exceed $25 billion. Here we are, a little more than three months after last year’s embers cooled, and what promises to be yet another historically expensive, destructive, and very likely deadly fire season is starting anew. Over the coming months, we’ll explore in this column how fires became so intense, so expensive to fight, and so deadly, as well as some of the solutions being tested by top foresters, economists, and scientists to restore fire’s place in the forest. In other words, we’ll ask: What is the future of fire in America?
According to Trader and many experts in her field, that question may be best answered here amid the remnants of Bandelier’s forests. What is happening here, she says, foreshadows what may be coming to many North American forests. In 1995, when Trader first came to the monument as an intern, Bandelier was forested with great stands of ponderosa pines and other conifers that had stood for millennia. Because of recent fires, much of the area is now dominated by locust shrubs; those pines may never return. “We’ve never seen this before!” Trader yells over a gust of wind so strong it knocks her off balance. “The vegetation—the composition and structure of the forest—it’s totally different than it was!”
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“This view still breaks my heart,” Trader says. Over her 23-year career, she’s seen ponderosa pines disappear from this part of the Jemez. We’ve left the mesas we toured earlier and are now at 9,000 feet overlooking Bandelier’s recent major fires. Across the Rio Grande Valley, we can see Santa Fe, with the pine-covered Rockies behind it. Below us are canyons that would look at home in the Mojave. The view is a study in contrasts. Through darker lenses, it’s a look into the future of many western landscapes.
The reasons the pines aren’t coming back here are myriad. Some seem obvious: Ponderosa pines sprout from seeds held in cones, and there are essentially no cone-producing trees for tens of thousands of acres. Others are less so. For example, the fires actually changed the soil’s composition. A recent study on how fire affects artifacts found that the only way to replicate Las Conchas’ heat was in a pottery kiln set to 900 degrees for 15 minutes. When Trader first came back to the park after that fire, the ash was as fine as baby powder and knee-deep. Then the rains came and swept the ash and soil into the Rio Grande in biblical floods. “Bandelier is a canary in the coalmine for North American forests when it comes to climate change,” says Craig Allen, a researcher at U.S. Geologic Survey who has studied these woods for most of 40 years. Under optimal conditions, the Southwest lies on the dry margin of where ponderosa pine forest can exist. Allen says the warming climate is pushing parts of the Southwest, particularly the lower elevations where ponderosa pine historically dominated, outside those margins. “As a general principle, extremes will get more extreme everywhere,” Allen says.
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https://www.outsideonline.com/2297996/fires-changing-forests
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