In this month’s Regenerative Water Alliance meeting, Thu Sept 1, 2022, 9am-10:30am (Pacific Time) we will be discussing how land hydration, groundwater, and humidity can help prevent wildfires. The usual fire prevention method focuses on thinning trees, and removing undergrowth. This removes fuel for the fire, but it can also lead to a decrease in the amount of water in the environment. We will open the discussion up of the importance of fuel load reduction vs increasing hydration as ways of lowering wildfire risk. We will look at how swales, check dams, improving the ability of soil to absorb rainwater, can hydrate the environment and increase groundwater.
Thomas Price, of the fire ecology network, and who worked for CalFire, will talk about how to increase moisture and humidity in landscape to fend off fires.
Monica Guzman, who is writing her PhD thesis on the topic, will talk about how increasing groundwater can lessen fires
Zoom Link: https://lnkd.in/gvhvPjaM
In this month’s Watershed Wisdom Council meeting on Tues Sept 13th 4-5:30pm (Pacific Time) people will get a chance to share about what is happening in their watershed, connect with others, and get advice from each other. We will discuss how you can start a watershed wisdom council in your area.
Zoom Link: https://lnkd.in/gvhvPjaM (same as above)
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In last month’s Watershed Wisdom Council meeting Hart Hagan shared about what we can do in our gardens and land to absorb more rain. These actions can help the small water cycle, keep plants hydrated into dry season, and help replenish groundwater. Here is a video of part of the session
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Here is some reading for reading and critical thinking about the water and fire issue for our Sept 1 event. It represents one perspective on the issue, and we will open the discussion up to the validity of this perspective.
The scientific paper, “Does increased forest protection correspond to higher fire severity in frequent-fire forests of the western United States?” is a survey of unmanaged and managed forests in the Western USA to determine their wildfire risk. Unmanaged forests where thinning and clearing was not practiced, were found to have less wildfire risk. The paper was written by biologists and ecologists Curtis Bradley, Chad Hanson, and Dominick DellaSala
An excerpt from the paper:
“It is a widely held assumption among federal land management agencies and others that a lack of active forest management of some federal forestlands—especially within relatively frequent-fire forest types such as ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) and mixed conifers—is associated with higher levels of fire severity when wildland fires occur. This prevailing forest/fire management hypothesis assumes that forests with higher levels of protection, and therefore less logging, will burn more intensely due to higher fuel loads and forest density. Recommendations have been made to increase logging as fuel reduction and decrease forest protections before wildland fire can be more extensively reintroduced on the landscape after decades of fire suppression. The concern follows that, in the absence of such a shift in forest management, fires are burning too severely and may adversely affect forest resilience. Nearly every fire season, the United States Congress introduces forest management legislation based on this view and aimed at increasing mechanical fuel treatments via intensive logging and weakened forest protections.
However, the fundamental premise for this fire management strategy has not been rigorously tested across broad regions. We broadly assessed the influence of forest protection levels on fire severity in pine and mixed-conifer forests of the western United States with relatively frequent-fire regimes to test this assumption. We used vegetation burn severity data from all fires >405 ha over a three-decade period, 1984–2014, in forests with varying levels of protection.
We found no evidence to support the prevailing forest/fire management hypothesis that higher levels of forest protections are associated with more severe fires based on the RF and linear mixed-effects modeling approaches. On the contrary, using over three decades of fire severity data from relatively frequent-fire pine and mixed-conifer forests throughout the western United States, we found support for the opposite conclusion—burn severity tended to be higher in areas with lower levels of protection status (more intense management), after accounting for topographic and climatic conditions in all three model runs. Thus, we rejected the prevailing forest management view that areas with higher protection levels burn most severely during wildfires.
Protection classes are relevant not only to recent or current forest management practices but also to past management. Millions of hectares of land have been protected from logging since the 1964 Wilderness Act and the 2001 Roadless Rule, but these areas are typically categorized as such due to a lack of historical road building and associated logging across patches >2000 ha, while GAP3 lands, for instance, such as National Forests lands under “multiple use management,” have generally experienced some form of logging activity over the last 80 yr.
An extension of the prevailing forest/fire management hypothesis is that biomass and fuels increase with increasing time after fire (due to suppression), leading to such intense fires that the most long-unburned forests will experience predominantly severe fire behavior. However, this was not the case for the most long-unburned forests in two ecoregions in which this question has been previously investigated—the Sierra Nevada of California and the Klamath-Siskiyou of northern California and southwest Oregon. In these ecoregions, the most long-unburned forests experienced mostly low/moderate-severity fire. Some of these researchers have hypothesized that as forests mature, the overstory canopy results in cooling shade that allows surface fuels to stay moister longer into fire season. This effect may also lead to a reduction in pyrogenic native shrubs and other understory vegetation that can carry fire, due to insufficient sunlight reaching the understory.
Another fundamental assumption is that current fires are becoming too large and severe compared to recent historical time lines . However, others have shown that this is not the case for most western forest types. For instance, using the MTBS (www.mtbs.gov) data set, Picotte et al. found that most vegetation groups in the conterminous United States exhibited no detectable change in area burned or fire severity from 1984 to 2010. Similarly, Hanson et al. (2009) found no increase in rates of high-severity fire from 1984 to 2005 in dry forests within the range of the northern spotted owl (Strix occidentalis caurina) based on the MTBS data set. Using reference data and records of high-severity fire, Baker (2015) found no significant upward trends in fire severity from 1984 to 2012 across all dry western forest regions (25.5 million ha), nearly all of which instead were too low or were within the range of historical rates. Parks et al. (2015) modeled area burned as a function of climatic variables in western forests and non-forest types, documenting most forested areas had experienced a fire deficit (observed vs. expected) during 1984 to 2012 that was likely due to fire suppression.
Whether fires are increasing or not depends to a large extent on the baseline chosen for comparisons. For instance, using time lines predating the fire suppression era, researchers have documented no significant increases in high-severity fire for dry forests across the West or for specific regions . Future trends, with climate change and increasing temperatures, may be less simple than previously believed, due to shifts in pyrogenic understory vegetation.
This is more than just a matter of academic debate, as most forest management policies assume that fire, particularly high-severity fire, is increasing, is in excess of recent historical baselines, and needs to be reduced in size, intensity, and occurrence over large landscapes to prevent widespread ecosystem damages. However, large fires (landscape scale or the so-called megafires) produce myriad ecosystem benefits underappreciated by most land managers and decision-makers . High-severity fire patches, in particular, provide a pulse of “biological legacies” (e.g., snags, down logs, and native shrub patches) essential for complex early seral associates (e.g., many bird species) that link seral stages from new forest to old growth . Complex early seral forests are most often logged after fire, which, along with aggressive fire suppression, exacerbates their rarity and heightens their conservation importance.”
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If you have a water event you would like to have mentioned in our Regenerative Water newsletter please send us an email with the info.
Here is the video from the meeting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9osZsI3NCtQ
The time was originally published incorrectly for the Watershed Wisdom Council in Sept, its now been changed to the correct Tues Sept 13 4-5:30pm (Pacific Time)