- Author: Pamela Kan-Rice
After a year of planning, a two-week controlled-burn training event will be held from Oct. 13 to 26. During the event, 30 fire professionals from California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Utah and Maine will be working and training with local hosts across northern California, with sites around Orick, Hayfork and Redding.
Last year, a similar event brought 40 firefighters from across the country to help the National Park Service and private landowners complete controlled burns as part of restoration and wildfire hazard reduction projects. Controlled burns are an important tool for creating fire safe communities, restoring resilient forests, and nurturing native plants and wildlife.
This summer, a wildfire that threatened the town of Weaverville was stopped when it hit an area burned eight months prior in a controlled burn. Previously burned areas were also critical to fire suppression efforts on the 2013 Rim Fire in the Sierra. These types of trainings are becoming increasingly important as drought and climate change increase the risk of severe fire, and land managers require new skills and experience to restore beneficial fire to the landscape while protecting communities and ecosystems from more destructive wildfires.
The Northern California Prescribed Fire Council and The Nature Conservancy are the main organizers of this year's event, which is designed to make the forests more fire resilient while at the same time helping fire professionals build new skills and partnerships. The same training model is being used across the country, with events held this year in Nebraska, Virginia, New Mexico, and in the mid-Klamath region of Humboldt County.
Participants in the fire training will include fire practitioners from local fire departments, government agencies, universities, non-governmental organizations, and local landowners. The training will be hosted by Redwood National Park, Whiskeytown National Recreation Area, and the Watershed Research and Training Center. In addition to working on the controlled burns, participants will learn about local fire ecology, laws and regulations, and how collaboration contributes to greater conservation.
These controlled burns will only be implemented if weather conditions meet the parameters for a safe, effective operation. Thanks to the recent rains, we are expecting conditions to line up nicely.
For more information, contact Yana Valachovic, UC Cooperative Extension Forest Advisor at (707) 445-7351 or yvala@ucanr.edu.
- Author: Ann Brody Guy
Backfiring — controlled burns to contain greater wildfire damage — are expected to begin today (Friday, Sept. 19) on the Blodgett property. The arson-sparked King Fire has burned more than 75,000 acres, triggering evacuations, incinerating trees, and closing Highway 50 and local roads. As of this morning the fire was only 10 percent contained, according to Calfire. University personnel have been evacuated from the research station and UC Berkeley fire experts in El Dorado County and on the Berkeley campus, based at the College of Natural Resources (CNR), are coordinating with the U.S. Forest Service, which manages wildfires in this region, and Calfire on priorities for defending the property.
“With 50 years of annual harvests and 40 years of annual measurements of permanent plots, Blodgett is the Rosetta Stone for the Sierra Nevada with respect to the interactions of forests, management and fires,” said William Stewart, a forestry researcher and co-director of UC Berkeley's Center for Forestry. In addition, Stewart said, the half-century of monitoring gives Blodgett the longest continuous record on forests in the Sierra Nevada.
While the spread of the King Fire to Blodgett would result in a discontinuity in the long-term data collection, it simultaneously would launch the start of data collection on a new continuum—a unique opportunity to learn, fire experts say.
“You'll change that continuous record, but also start a whole new record that reflects the fundamental role of disruptive elements of Sierra ecology,” said J. Keith Gilless, CNR dean and a forest economics professor.
Researchers would also get valuable information on current experiments and hypotheses.
“Our investments in improving forest resiliency will be severely tested if the King Fire enters our property,” Stewart said. “We will find out how effective those investments have been.” For example, effectiveness of vegetation treatments, such as cutting low brush and young trees, or creating patchworks of smaller clear-cut areas, will be tested in a more severe way than is possible under normal research conditions.
“You never say, ‘let's light a really, really hot fire and see how the stand holds up,'” said Gilless. “But you can go in and do analysis after an event like this: We hypothesized these treatments would be effective; do they actually deliver when put to the test by an uncontrolled wildfire?”
Scientists are already preparing to collect data—soil samples, tree mortality rates, information on char height (burns to the trunks) and scorch height (burns to the treetops)— both to understand how the fire burned and increase the potential to bring back a healthy forest.
Not every tree dies in a wildfire. But damaged trees become more susceptible to pests and pathogens, which can kill them or inhibit the growth of other vegetation. “We can measure the potential resilience of a forest by understanding the level of damage and mortality, and how our forest-management practices influenced those outcomes,” said fire science professor Scott Stephens.
The researchers say it's also opportunity to employ adaptive management, a forestry best practice that involves learning from the results of each fire, analyzing what worked, what didn't, and why; and then applying those lessons.
With the fire advancing and Blodgett in an area currently slated to be allowed to burn, researchers are scurrying to organize their efforts.
“Unlike much of the research we do, an event like this imposes its own timetable. You have to deal with it in real time,” Gilless said. And while collective fingers are crossed that Blodgett will survive, Berkeley's fire researchers must prepare for any outcome. “Everything that transpires in nature is an opportunity to learn,” added Gilless.
A trove of past — and future — data
The research station is located in an area where danger posed by severe wildfires is very high. For the past two decades it has been a center for UC Berkeley research projects that evaluate the effectiveness of treated plots against control plots—unmanaged ecological reserves.
The findings from this research have already had broad impacts on how fires are managed locally, statewide, nationally, and internationally. Data gathered at Blodgett have helped scientists, forest managers, and fire experts understand:
• How different forest and fuel management techniques work over time;
• How forest management approaches affect biodiversity;
• How processes like nutrient cycling and carbon cycling actually operate in forests.
For example, biodiversity studies showed that a mosaic of tree sizes and openings create more habitat niches for birds and animals. Fuel treatment studies have show that reducing tree and shrub densities increase the probability that medium and large size trees can survive wildfires.
Stephens, whose recent research includes thinning young forests to reduce fire risk and greenhouse gas emissions, says the King Fire is a symptom of California's larger forest problem.
“Almost all of the Sierra Nevada is in a state of high fire hazard because of past fire suppression, and harvesting that focused on large trees,” a practice that left the more susceptible smaller trees and debris, increasing fuel loads. “It will take decades of active management to reduce hazards and produce resilient forests,” Stephens said. “This will not be easy but it is possible. If we don't get this work done, future generations will not enjoy forests as we have, and forests will be fundamentally different, with much more severe wildfire impacts. ”
Related Links
Fire map on UC Berkeley Center for Forestry
Incident Information System map
Blodgett Research Forest
- Author: Pamela Kan-Rice
May 15, 2014
CONTACTS: Pam Kan-Rice, (510) 206-3476, pam.kanrice@ucanr.edu and Jeannette Warnert, (559) 240-9850, jewarnert@ucanr.edu
University of California ANR wildfire experts
Carl Bell
UC Cooperative Extension regional advisor for invasive plants
Bell conducts wildfire recovery and invasive weeds research in San Diego, Orange, Los Angeles, Ventura, Riverside and San Bernardino counties.
(760) 815-2777
cebell@ucanr.edu
Mike De Lasaux
UC Cooperative Extension natural resources advisor for Plumas and Sierra counties.
Areas of expertise – wildfire fuel reduction on small forest parcels, forestry and watershed management.
(530) 283-6125
Sabrina Drill
UC Cooperative Extension natural resources advisor for Los Angeles and Ventura counties.
Drill holds workshops to teach homeowners that the arrangement and proper maintenance of plants around homes in the wildland-urban interface can help reduce the risk of wildfire. Also, that choosing the right plants can protect the health of neighboring habitat by limiting the introduction of invasive plants.
(626) 586-1975
Keith Gilless
UC Berkeley professor of forest economics in the College of Natural Resources.
Area of expertise -- Wildland fire protection planning; forest economics and management; evaluation of prescribed burning.
Gilless has studied large urban-wildland fires, including the Oakland-Berkeley and Santa Barbara fires, to evaluate the probability of a house within the fire perimeter surviving as a function of the house's structural characteristics, its surrounding vegetation, and the defensive actions taken to protect it.
(510) 642-7171
Jan Gonzales
University of California Cooperative Extension project coordinator for the Wildfire Zone
The Wildfire Zone (www.wildfirezone.org) is a wildfire education and outreach program in San Diego County. Gonzales has been involved with wildfire prevention, safety and recovery education since 2005. She is an executive board member of the San Diego County Fire Safe Council and member of county and regional area safety task forces on wildfire and forest health issues.
(858) 822-7718
Susan Kocher
UC Cooperative Extension natural resources advisor for Amador, Calaveras, Tuolumne and El Dorado counties.
After the Angora Fire near Lake Tahoe, Kocher evaluated the effectiveness of defensible space. She helped the California Tahoe Conservancy forester set up a rapid parcel assessment to identify high priority treatment sites on their parcels. Kocher worked with the California Department of Forestry structure damage assessment team to see how their formal evaluation methodology functions and collaborated with Ed Smith of University of Nevada Cooperative Extension to film examples of defensible space for the “Living with Fire in the Tahoe Basin” Web site, http://www.livingwithfire.info/tahoe/
(530) 542-2571
Max Moritz
UC Cooperative Extension wildfire specialist in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at UC Berkeley. He is located in Santa Barbara County.
Areas of expertise -- Wildland fire, fire modeling, fire effects, shrubland ecosystems and spatial patterns of fire disturbance. By looking closely at fire history and monitoring plant moisture levels in the Santa Monica Mountains, Moritz and his colleagues developed a way to predict when an area becomes vulnerable to large-scale fires.
(805) 893-2125
Glenn Nader
UC Cooperative Extension natural resources advisor for Sutter and Yuba counties.
Areas of expertise -- Landscaping for fire safety
(530) 822-7515
Kimberly Rodrigues
UC Cooperative Extension natural resources advisor
Rodrigues' research focused on how to make public participation in resource management more meaningful and relevant to reduce conflicts. She participated in the Sierra Nevada Adaptive Management Project, a 10-year project that has the potential to transform not only how we view forest fires, but how scientists, government agencies and public stakeholders interact in the pursuit of common goals.
(530) 750-1283
Tom Scott
UC Berkeley Cooperative Extension area natural resources wildlife specialist for Southern California.
Areas of expertise -- conservation of wildlife, wildlife management at the urban-wildland interface, and response of wildlife to fire. After a catastrophic 1993 fire season, Scott was instrumental in developing subsequent meetings and a book on fire ecology, management and policy. Scott authored Brushfires in California: Ecology and resource management in 1995, with Jon Keeley.
(951) 827-5115
John Shelly
UC Cooperative Extension forest products and biomass utilization advisor
Areas of expertise -- Forest products, wood manufacturing methods, biomass utilization, physical properties of wood.
(510) 665-3491
Scott Stephens
Associate professor of fire science and co-director Center for Fire Research and Outreach at UC Berkeley
Areas of expertise -– Wildland fire science, fire ecology, fire behavior, wildfire.
(510) 642-7304
Bill Stewart
UC Cooperative Extension forestry specialist in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at UC Berkeley and co-director Center for Fire Research and Outreach
Areas of expertise -– Economics of fire prevention and fire suppression programs, economic assessment of property damages and environmental damages from fires.
(510) 643-3130
The researchers measured atmospheric nitrogen deposition levels at ten sites throughout the Santa Monica Mountains and found significantly higher pollution levels in the eastern end, closer to Los Angeles.
Generally attributed to vehicle emissions in the Santa Monica Mountains, nitrogen deposition is the air pollution from industry, agriculture and transportation that settles out of the atmosphere and onto the earth’s surface.
The study is helping the scientists better understand how high nitrogen levels affect native vegetation and what that might mean for fire risk in such a fire-prone region.
“Invasive annual grasses from the Mediterranean have a greater growth response to nitrogen than most native species, and are crowding out native plants,” says Edith Allen, a professor of plant ecology and Cooperative Extension specialist at UC Riverside, and the principal investigator for the study. “Grasses also produce fine, flashy fuels that cause more frequent and larger fires, promoting vegetation-type conversion from native shrubland to exotic annual grassland.”
The preliminary results are from the first year of a three-year study undertaken by Allen, Irina Irvine, a restoration ecologist for Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, and Andrzej Bytnerowicz and Mark Fenn of the U.S. Forest Service.
At the two sites with the best air quality, the researchers added various levels of nitrogen fertilizer into experimental plots of coastal sage scrub to simulate pollution levels found throughout the mountains. They found that the higher levels of nitrogen led to a decline in native shrub seedlings and an increase in nonnative grasses.
Other studies in Australia and California have demonstrated a link between nonnative grasses, also known as “flashy fuels,” and larger and more frequent wildfires.
“The recent fire of May 2013 burned our research plots, but provides an opportunity to learn how invasive grasses compete with native seedlings establishing post fire under nitrogen deposition,” Allen said. “The data will enable us to determine critical loads of nitrogen deposition to help set clean air regulations to protect native ecosystems.”
Coastal sage scrub once covered much of coastal California and is now an endangered habitat type, primarily due to development.
Funded by the National Park Service’s Air Resources Division, the $100,000 study will help the scientists better determine the “critical load” when vegetation shifts, causing alterations to the structure and functionality of ecosystems.
For more information, please visit: http://ucrtoday.ucr.edu/20098
- Author: Robert Sanders, (510) 643-6998, rsanders@berkeley.edu
In a press announcement accompanying the release of the studies, Secretary of Natural Resources John Laird noted that “significant increases in wildfires, floods, severe storms, drought and heat waves are clear evidence that climate change is happening now. California is stepping up to lead the way in preparing for — and adapting to — this change. These reports use cutting-edge science to provide an analytical roadmap, pointing the way for taking concrete steps to protect our natural resources and all Californians.”
Laird and others appeared yesterday at a press conference in Sacramento, where Robert B. Weisenmiller, chair of the California Energy Commission, called the reports “historic” and praised the scientists who contributed.
“We scientists know that climate change is and will be significantly affecting the state’s energy supply and demand system,” he said. “The research in these assessments furthers our understanding of the impacts …. The challenges are enormous, but certainly this state has the capability to rise to those challenges, and with these types of studies we are going to be prepared. We will use these in the energy commission planning … to maintain a reliable grid, but also use this as a way of planning our research.”
Laird and Weisenmiller were joined at the press conference by Chief Ken Pimlott, director of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire), who painted a grim picture of the state’s fire future. Of the 20 worst fires in California history, 11 have occurred since 2002, he said. The fire season in some areas has increased by an average of two months, and a few areas in Southern California now have a year-round fire season.
“Studies like those being released today are key in helping us move forward to prepare California” to deal with these large and damaging fires, said Pimlott.
State’s fire season longer, fires more intense
UC Berkeley fire expert Max Moritz, who contributed a paper about increased vulnerability to wildland fires in the state, has been warning of increasing fire danger for years.
“Our results reveal that California should prepare — regardless of the future we may face climatically — for quite different fire activity levels in the future,” said Moritz, UC Cooperative Extension specialist in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at UC Berkeley. “Though our models continue to improve, we still don’t know which future climate scenario will actually emerge. The challenge is to learn to ‘coexist’ with this natural hazard and move toward fire-resilient ecosystems and fire-resistant urban development.”
Speaking for the more than 120 scientists in 26 teams who contributed to the studies, Susanne Moser, a Social Science Research Fellow at Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment, said that the report “spells out our new understanding of what climate change might mean to California. We are trying to inform the public, we are trying to inform the decision makers, with valuable information that they can use in … planning.”
The reports represent the third assessment commissioned by the California Climate Change Center since 2006, following up on discussions and topics presented at the Governor’s Conference on Extreme Climate Risks and California’s Future held last December in San Francisco. The new studies will provide a foundation for the 2012 Climate Adaptation Strategy, which is expected to be completed in December 2012.
David Ackerly, who co-authored three of the papers released yesterday, provided a new vegetation map that will allow planners to see how the Bay Area will likely change in the future.
“The big result that comes out of the models — and we have to remember that they are models — is a very wide expansion of chaparral and the loss of the cooler oak woodlands. And as climate change becomes more extreme, the Bay Area looks more and more like Santa Barbara or areas farther south, and the vegetation begins to look like Southern California, which is mostly scrublands,” said Ackerly, a professor of integrative biology. “That could take a hundred years or more, but the short-term result is that the dead trees become a fire danger and alien weeds invade.”
The short-term impacts are the most uncertain, he said, though UC Berkeley scientists hope to fill in these gaps through a broad research effort, the Berkeley Initiative in Global Change Biology.
“We hope to answer the question, ‘How fast can these changes really occur?’” he said.
Ackerly said that through his reports, which synthesized previous and ongoing research, he particularly wanted to link the expected decline of biodiversity throughout the state with a more visible impact on the ecosystem services people take for granted. The predicted march of desert northward into the San Joaquin Valley will make some areas unsuitable for agriculture, for example, while warmer winters may mean that plums and peaches will not get the winter chill they need to produce fruit.
“This is not merely nature for nature’s sake; nature and the services we expect from nature are all connected,” he said.
Gov. Jerry Brown is listening to these reports, according to Ken Alex, Brown’s senior policy advisor and director of the Office of Planning and Research, who also spoke at the press conference.
“Here in California, we do make policy decisions based on the science,” he said. “Gov. Brown actually reads the science, and he takes it very seriously, and I know that at a very deeply personal level, he wants to do something about climate change and wants to see California take the leadership role.”
The 26 teams submitting reports were led by researchers from around the state, including 15 from UC Berkeley, 19 from other UC campuses and two from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. For highlights from the reports, link to the CEC’s press release (PDF). To download the full reports, link to CEC’s website.
“The incredible breadth of studies, as well as the depth of their analyses, reveals just how much the University of California has to offer in preparing us all to adapt to a changing climate,” Moritz added. “Hopefully, it also demonstrates how important it is to grow this scientific capacity within our public university system.”