How Productive Are Common Wildfire Prevention Methods?
By Lily Reese, WellKind Forestry Intern
Lily Reese was an intern for WellKind Forestry during our summer 2022 session, exploring wildfires and other environmental topics.
The normalcy of the “fire season” has introduced new questions for many residents of California and the rest of the United States: Why are wildfires continuing to be so severe? What isn’t working for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CALFIRE) and the U.S. Forest Service’s current policies?
The answer is that they're doing too much. The heavy-handed wildfire prevention methods that these agencies utilize often create an environment that does more to serve fast burning wildfires than it does to stop them.
Currently, the Forest Service’s policy for fire prevention is “to reduce fire hazard through active fuels management via logging and prescribed burning. Efforts are designed to complement continued fire suppression, assistance to local communities, and rehabilitation” (Stone, C., Hudak, A. T., & Morgan, P., 2004). While it is important to suppress dangerous wildfires and assist local communities, the process of logging is extremely damaging to the environment as well as counter-intuitive.
Forest thinning, a form of land management of cutting trees in densely forested areas, is one example of a flawed technique in intensive forest management. The largest study to date on forest thinning tracked its impacts from data dating back 30 years and covering 9.4 million hectares. It found that forests that were thinned actually had larger, more intense fires than areas that were not thinned (Bradley, Hanson, and Dellasala, 2016).
Why is this the case? When areas are thinned, oftentimes remnants of branches and brush are left behind as natural compost; these twigs and sticks serve as fuel, providing a wildfire with much more to burn. Logging also creates issues with low-bearing plants and brush on the forest floors. When canopies and the higher tree branches are removed, more sunlight is exposing the ground, which in turn dries out the plants on the forest floor, again creating more dry fuel for fires. In addition, when a fire comes into a forest cleared by thinning, the wind has fewer trees stopping it from driving up the flames’ speeds (Chaunag, 2018).
Forest fires are natural and will occur; the severity of these forest fires is what can be altered. In most cases forests can be protected from serve damaging forest fires by maintaining the natural ecosystem and helping the trees already in a forest.
As the climate crisis continues, it is important that fire management, forest management and other enviormental protection methods continue to adapt with science, new findings and the areas impacted. As Penelope Morgan, a professor of fire ecology and forest ecology at the University of Idaho says, “One the clearest lesson from history is that fires have always occurred and that they will continue to occur despite our efforts to detect and suppress them” (Stone, Hudak, & Morgan, 2004).
References
Abella, S. R., & Springer, J. D. (2015, January 1). Effects of tree cutting and fire on understory vegetation in mixed conifer forests. science direct. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378112714005325
Bradley, C. M, et al. (2016, October 26). Does increased forest protection correspond to higher fire severity in frequent-fire forests of the western United States? Ecosphere. https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ecs2.1492#:~:text=We%20found%20no%20evidence%20to,linear%20mixed-effects%20modeling%20approaches
Chaunag, L. (2018, November 19). 5 big myths about wildfire. The Wilderness Society. Retrieved July 19, 2022, from https://www.wilderness.org/articles/article/5-big-myths-about-wildfire
Evans, A. M., Everett, R. G., Stephens, S. L., & Youlz, J. A. (2011). Comprehensive fuels treatment practices guide for mixed conifer forests: California, Central and Southern Rockies, and the Southwest.
Stone, C., Hudak, A. T., & Morgan, P. (2004). Forest harvest can increase subsequent forest fire severity.
Westover, R. h. (2021, August 19). Thinning the Forest for the Trees | US Forest Service. Forest Service. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://www.fs.usda.gov/features/thinning-forest-trees