"No fire oh nine"

The phrase "fire return interval" refers to the time in between fire events. So, in the early stages of woodland or glade restoration, conscientious managers implement a short fire return interval, fires every year or every two years until the landscape reaches a certain point in restoration. Once that point is reached, you can increase your fire return intervals, burning every three to five years to better mimic those historic fire regimes that gave rise to Missouri's rich natural communities before European settlement. In many of our degraded landscapes, we're still in the restoration phase, one that requires fire application much more frequently than, say, our Native American ancestors would have seen fit.

I fortunately ran into one of Missouri's finest land managers this week, a gentleman who loves setting fire to woodlands as much as I do (maybe). I really don't know much about him except his staunch passion for ecosystem restoration --maybe he's into woodworking or maybe he's even a published poet, a father of quintuplets or something, but when I see him, we talk about fire and woodlands, and woodlands and fire.

So when I saw him Wednesday, snow falling all around us, he declared 2009 a wash, a fall and winter season of no fires, "it's been a no-fire 2009." We talked about our targets for 2010, both of us wanting to burn at least 6,000 acres, hopefully more. But the weather, man, the snow and rain and snow and rain has effectively shut down fire for the Ozarks this winter. To add insult to injury, we've tapped our resources with the Highway Patrol, money left for only one more aerial deer count, so we can't even take advantage of the snow cover. We've been clobbered with snow, no money for deer counts, and stuck with a landscape too wet for fire for at least two more weeks....if the snow and rain let up.

All of this wet weather during the winter does not bode well for spring fire season. With prescribed fire becoming more difficult to implement due to increased urbanization and unfounded fear of wildfires, conducting prescribed fire on our key tracts of land is becoming a political issue. Long gone are the days when private landowners set fire to their woods every spring (to kill ticks or to provide forage for their cattle). I heard this week that in the not-so-distant past, Smokey Bear conducted traffic in the Niangua Basin during spring fire season. So, maybe this is an unofficial "heads up": We really want to burn during January and February because fire behaviour isn't so squirrely, but the weather just hasn't been conducive to it. I can't even burn firewood in my backyard this winter. The world is too wet around here. So, we're hedging our bets that spring will be a highly flammable season for ecosystem management. No one I know really likes April fires, but if dry weather doesn't come until April, then we're stuck with April fires. This is the unofficial notice.

Brief return to the growing season

The white skies and persistently wet, brown landscape are still with us today. For the past few weeks, I've combed through my folders of photos from the 2009 field season to find the perfect photos for a project due on Monday. And in an effort to finish the project before Sunday, I found it incumbent to stay away from my office's notorious time burglars. I worked from my living room table all day. All that time burglarizing that takes place really does impede my progress, but it also forces me to stop what I'm doing to at least refill my water glass or take a lunchtime walk through the nearby neighborhood with my secretary. Today, I've sat cross-legged in my chair since 6:50 am, leaving behind a half pot of coffee in the kitchen and a desk phone 27 miles away to ring, ring, ring until someone else grabs it.

I may have posted some of these before, but they're so jolly, that I'm sharing them again. Feel free to steal the last one that shows the line of demarcation between active management and lack of management; it's very illustrative of "why we burn." (Too, the close up image of one of my sampling plots--chocked full of forbs after a November fire). Nevertheless, many of us in Missouri likely agree that the bright grassy managed side of the road (filled with flowers and butterflies and songbirds) is much nicer to walk through at any time of the year.

To Air

So, my library harbors a big blue plastic cube that rests in the middle of the main foyer that holds standing copies of "Staff Recommendation" hardback books--topically, these books run the gamut (to be expected in a progressive little town like this one). Sometimes there are large print children's books on the cube, in spring, gardening books, during Christmas, how-to books on homemade gifts. Recently, the marginal theme was climate change, and Al Gore's new book rested on top of the cube; I checked it out without flipping through it beforehand. When I returned home, I started reading it until I hit the early pages in which he blames forest fires for polluting the atmosphere, for perhaps causing the same levels of damage to the atmosphere as factory animal farms and automobile emissions.

I read the part about how damaging woods-on-fire can be to the atmosphere, then returned the book to the circulation desk. No allowances made for the necessity of restoring the fire matrix to fire-adapted ecosystems and their significant grass-forb structure. Nothing mentioned about the importance of healthy ecosystems in the (losing) battle against climate change or even the amount of carbon that grass-forb layers -which are dependent on fire- can sequester.

And so, now, a few weeks later, this comes through the post from EurekAlert!, still not addressing the importance of healthy ecosystems, but a start:

Effects of forest fire on carbon emissions, climate impacts often overestimated

CORVALLIS, Ore. – A recent study at Oregon State University indicates that some past approaches to calculating the impacts of forest fires have grossly overestimated the number of live trees that burn up and the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere as a result.

The research was done on the Metolius River Watershed in the central Oregon Cascade Range, where about one-third – or 100,000 acres – of the area burned in four large fires in 2002-03. Although some previous studies assumed that 30 percent of the mass of living trees was consumed during forest fires, this study found that only 1-3 percent was consumed.

Some estimates done around that time suggested that the B&B Complex fire in 2003, just one of the four Metolius fires, released 600 percent more carbon emissions than all other energy and fossil fuel use that year in the state of Oregon – but this study concluded that the four fires combined produced only about 2.5 percent of annual statewide carbon emissions.

Even in 2002, the most extreme fire year in recent history, the researchers estimate that all fires across Oregon emitted only about 22 percent of industrial and fossil fuel emissions in the state – and that number is much lower for most years, about 3 percent on average for the 10 years from 1992 to 2001.

The OSU researchers said there are some serious misconceptions about how much of a forest actually burns during fires, a great range of variability, and much less carbon released than previously suggested. Some past analyses of carbon release have been based on studies of Canadian forests that are quite different than many U.S. forests, they said.

"A new appreciation needs to be made of what we're calling 'pyrodiversity,' or wide variation in fire effects and responses," said Garrett Meigs, a research assistant in OSU's Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society. "And more studies should account for the full gradient of fire effects."

The past estimates of fire severity and the amounts of carbon release have often been high and probably overestimated in many cases, said Beverly Law, a professor of forest ecosystems and society at OSU.

"Most of the immediate carbon emissions are not even from the trees but rather the brush, leaf litter and debris on the forest floor, and even below ground," Law said. "In the past we often did not assess the effects of fire on trees or carbon dynamics very accurately."

Even when a very severe fire kills almost all of the trees in a patch, the scientists said, the trees are still standing and only drop to the forest floor, decay, and release their carbon content very slowly over several decades. Grasses and shrubs quickly grow back after high-severity fires, offsetting some of the carbon release from the dead and decaying trees. And across most of these Metolius burned areas, the researchers observed generally abundant tree regeneration that will result in a relatively fast recovery of carbon uptake and storage.

"A severe fire does turn a forest from a carbon sink into an atmospheric carbon source in the near-term," Law said. "It might take 20-30 years in eastern Oregon, where trees grow and decay more slowly, for the forest to begin absorbing more carbon than it gives off, and 5-10 years on the west side of the Cascades."

Since fire events are episodic in nature while greenhouse gas emissions are continuous and increasing, climate change mitigation strategies focused on human-caused emissions will have more impact than those emphasizing wildfire, the researchers said. And to be accurate, estimates of carbon impacts have to better consider burn severity, non-tree responses, and below-ground processes, they said.

"Even though it looks like everything is burning up in forest fires, that simply isn't what happens," Meigs said. "The trees are not vaporized even during a very intense fire. In a low-severity fire many of them are not even killed. And in the Pacific Northwest, the majority of burned area is not stand-replacement fire."

Fire suppression has resulted in a short-term reduction of greenhouse gases, the researchers said, but on a long-term basis fire will still be an inevitable part of forest ecosystems. Timber harvest also has much more impact on carbon dynamics than fire. Because of this, forest fires will be a relatively minor player in greenhouse gas mitigation strategies compared to other factors, such as human consumption of fossil fuels, they said.

Global warming could cause higher levels of forest fire and associated carbon emissions in the future, the researchers said, although there are many uncertainties about how climate change will affect forests, and no indication that forest fire carbon emissions will become comparable to those caused by fossil fuel use.

This research was published recently in the journal Ecosystems, and funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.

Hell has frozen over.

It's hard to think of anything to say tonight besides "wooo!" and "whooohooo!" and variations on the theme. The Saints defense had a lousy showing tonight, and Brett Favre (traitor) acted like a big baby throughout the game. But forget all of that, New Orleans must be in uproar tonight, throngs so loud and boisterous I'd be able to hear them from the closed windows of my Marigny apartment until about 3, maybe 4 a.m. Actually, I'd be out there among them. Who Dat, indeed.

Adaptation

Of all of my dear friends, I wager that only the esteemed Dr. Nathan Wood, expert in all things Eastern European, knows that Moscow treats their historic and noble stray dogs with the same reverence and tolerance as Athens treats their vile feral cat populations. According to one researcher, the persistent stray dog population in Moscow has, in the past 200 years, evolved into ecological subtypes: dogs who ride subways and beg, dogs who stalk and forage on wild animals, dogs who guard fenced installations and receive food from watchmen, and dogs who merely scavenge trash heaps (like the packs of stray dogs in New Orleans).

On the heels of the wide release of Noah Baumbach's adaptation of a simple Roald Dahl story, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, in which wild animals have -by hook and crook- adapted to man's persistent methods of eradicating them from the earth, I offer a link: click here for a long article about wild dogs adapting to life in Moscow and foxes who have learned through training certain traits of domesticated dogs.

In the (beautifully produced, stunning art direction) Noah Baumbach interpretation of The Fantastic Mr. Fox, one wily fox's determination to antagonize three factory farm operators in his quest for good food results in the entire region's wildlife populations (from badgers and gophers to opossums)relocating to the local sewer system. The life they've found is not sustainable, of course, and the local landowners have laid waste to the English countryside which has sustained them, despite inhabitation by humans, for at least the first part of the movie.

Naturally, my thoughts turned to the rampant urbanization in the Niangua Basin. With changing land use practices, changing demographics, and an ever-growing human population (few in conservation will ever touch population explosion as an issue), the vibrant landscape which harbors huge populations of watch-listed birds, rare fish, amphibians (and so forth) is becoming unsustainable. In a region that has been maintained with regular fire return intervals for the past 5,000 years, now being subdivided into smaller parcels, passing to landowners unaware of the significance of this area to greater conservation goals--and the importance of fire to these fire-adapted species-- I don't think the area will be able to provide the necessary forage for the rich small mammal populations here, the distinctive dense shrub layers for yellow-breasted chats, or even large contiguous tracts of grassy woodlands for Northern bobwhite quail. But in the past 200 years, the stray dogs in Moscow have learned the feeding patterns of humans and how to ride the subway system. Maybe the indigo buntings will find a home in those enormous fake palm trees illuminated in flashing hot pink and fluorescent orange advertised on the side of the road next to the Casey's.

Commonality

Sometimes, regardless of where we live, some of us may occasionally take for granted the notable aspects of the place that attracted us there to begin with. My baby sister, a 10+ year resident of Teton Valley, probably no longer brakes in amazement to gawk at ravens eating trash on the side of the road (like I do). I suspect Stellar's jays, antelope, and Clark's nutcrackers are to Alyssa what tufted titmice, red-tailed hawks, and coyotes are to her Missouri-bound sister. They're nice to see, they were pretty amazing to us years ago, but they're always around, part of the landscape that we now hike through for exercise. You go elsewhere to be amazed.

Rewind to the early part of the decade when I first moved to Missouri for a summer job and found myself surrounded by red-headed woodpeckers. The large, garrulous, and dapper birds came to my feeders, they ate acorns around my storage shed house, they filled the managed woodlands and even the neighborhoods in the area with their repetitive churls as they moved from post oak to white oak.

So, I guess I was a little disappointed while exploring the rest of the Ozark Highlands to learn that red-headed woodpeckers weren't the dominant woodland birds in other settings. I spent so much time in the (frequently burned) 3,907 acres I worked in that I thought the rest of the Ozarks looked just like it, so surely I'd find the same density of red-headed woodpeckers out there, too. I didn't know I was working in a reference point-landscape....

Because I was wrong on both accounts, I set out on the winter bird survey last week excited once again to hear and see red-headed woodpeckers. My colleague/birding partner mentioned earlier that day that he has so many of them in his own chert woodlands--which he burns--that when his 4 year old daughter set her stale gingerbread house on the deck after Christmas, red-headed, red-bellied and pileated woodpeckers descended on the confection like a flock of starlings in a McDonald's parking lot littered with French fries.

The winter bird survey occurred in the same place I conducted my spring/summer survey, which was notably devoid of red-headed woodpeckers (less than 10?). In fact, large groups of them didn't arrive here until July. These woodlands possess the structure, forage, and old growth trees required for breeding red-headed woodpeckers, but they don't spend the breeding season there.

Nevertheless, red-headeds are out right now in high numbers in certain parts of the Ozarks. Here, in my official (thanks to the Columbia Police Department who published lines of demarcation between high and low crime neighborhoods) bad neighborhood, one filled with big old trees, the Northern flickers, red-bellieds, downies and even the occasional hairy and pileated woodpeckers devour suet on a weekly basis, but no word from the red-headeds.

...and then on foot

The most gratifying moments of the day did not occur when we spotted the common merganzer, 18 great blue herons hanging out on the opposite shore, and the striking common goldeneye spotted in our first stop on our winter bird survey this morning. Oh, that was nice lagniappe, but when my colleague stood on the back side of Spencer Creek and saw through the gnarled black oaks a sweeping vista of glade-open woodland dipping down into drainage-closed canopy woodland, then moving back upslope into glade open woodland all from one spot, I think he finally realized what he had done in the past 9 years with all those fires.


From a beautiful day in the field, made only better by my thawed hands to compensate for the sopping wet feet and lack of field food. Ice curtains over a cave entrance; open chert woodlands (1250: downy, red bellied, red headed, brown creeper, nuthatch, goldfinch, yellow rumped warbler...); the view from Spencer Creek looking at Lodge Glade and a small part of the natural area. (I think he said, "man, that looks great except all them cedars. We'll get those next...")