> A University of Colorado/Boulder study shows that when forests burn across significant portions of the Rocky Mountains, the forests do not regrow. Even after 15 years post-fire, 80% of the surveyed plots contained no new trees.
> Even after 15 years post-fire, 80% of the surveyed plots contained no new trees.
So 20% did, why?
> Global warming has contributed to a doubling of the number of acres burned across the country since the 1990s.
While I agree that climate change is real, so is mismanagement of our forests. Which is to blame most?
Frankly, the use of the phrase Global Warming (instead of the more accurate and more accepted Climate Change) makes we suspect of the strength of the argument.
After a normal fire trees begin regrowing immediately, and many trees survive. The fires weve been having are in forests choked with dead fuel, so they burn extremely hot and kill absolutely everything including the soil. There is supposed the be a mycelial network and microorganisms and seeds left in place after a fire.
Part of the reason for the current state of things is mismanagement through blanket fire prevention. Another part is things like pine beetle in colorado and new mexico killing millions of acres of trees because of warmer temperatures associated with climate change, and that wood drying out for years in the desert air.
Sooo for the last few hundereds of millions of years, which included a much warmer periods than the current one, trees somehow always managed to regrow, and chose this very moment to cease doing it?
Would it be that shocking for the first ever species to spew enormous amounts of heavy metals and other pollutants into the atmosphere and waters to have stressed the world’s forests in a new way?
When photosynthesis first evolved, the extra oxygen in the atmosphere killed off nearly everything on the surface (by covering it with ice). It took a very long time indeed to subsequently evolve cellular respiration and bring things back into balance (see the "Great Oxygenation Event" for more).
So what I'm saying is that we won't even have been the first species to have done so.
The current trees are under pressure from drought and increased temperature caused by global warming. They don’t regrow after fires at the rate they did in the recent past. Not enough time has passed for adaptation to take hold. The sudden increase in green house gasses is such that plants and animals haven’t had enough time to adapt. Eventually an equilibrium will be reached and things will stabilize. We aren’t at that point yet. The plants around millions of years ago during warmer periods than now are not the same plants today for the most part. They were suited for the environment at that time.
I barely escaped the 2018 Paradise Camp Fire. It hadn't rained for 200+ days, was very windy, dry, and cold. I think NorCal, and much of the world, is slowly desertifying if climate change continues.
Spoiled brats aren't good at empathy I guess. Civilization emerged in the last 10k years or so because of climactic conditions. Before that, shiz was regularly cray cray. Even .1MY ago shiz was messed up bad in terms of supporting nice stable large populations. Agriculture? haha no, enjoy glaciers. Go back farther than that and the magnitude of disaster is regularly Lovecraftian. The thing you're taking for granted is that you have any conception of what the deep past looks like whatsoever. Wiki it around a bit; use your imagination. absolutely terrifying. Trees not regrowing is a super normal thing to happen when climactic patterns shift. Ever wonder why they built the pyramids in the desert? It should be obvious: didn't used to be a desert. Common theme in archaeological sites: surrounded by barren waste. That's microclimates and water flow, but again, stimulate your imagination. The past isn't going to come up and beat you over the head, but the future friggin is.
> Ever wonder why they built the pyramids in the desert? It should be obvious: didn't used to be a desert.
Uh, no. Egypt was desert when the Pyramids were built. Egyptian civilization existed (and still does) in a narrow ribbon along the Nile; the Pyramids of Giza are only about five miles from it. They're certainly not in the middle of nowhere, that's just the camera angles working. (See https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/94/Giza-pyr... for an alternative view.)
Forest management history is complex and varied, and depends a lot on specific details about the forests.
Logging practices over the past two hundred years have had big impacts on how the forest ecology works: what trees grow, what animals and insects live there and how much floor litter there is. All of this has an impact on whether a fire comes through and sterilizes the soil or leaves it fertile.
There was immense pressure for the forest service to support logging and grazing, both of which dramatically alter the landscape.
Another complication is that the native Americans in the area had their own silviculture practice that optimized for their own needs (by and large not lumber), so pre-white historical guides aren’t necessarily “natural” either.
So the forests always regrew, but then we changed them (and stopped allowing fires). In the meanwhile the environment changed as we pumped more carbon into the atmosphere. Now when we reintroduce fire the results are different.
The fire intensities are much higher due to various factors. This kills more of the mature trees and alters the soil nutrient composition such that it become water repellent.
The same effects have been noted in Australian mega-fires over the past decade.
It's been about 100 million years since the last time the CO2 ppm was this high. And it's never gotten this high this fast ever before. A hundred million years is a long time for plants to adapt. 50 years is not
Exactly. Nature does adapt, but it takes time for a species that previously didn't thrive in a locale to spread there. Often a lot of time compared to a human lifetime.
Ignoring the subtle climate change denialism: North American forests have been mismanaged for decades. Coupled with environmental factors this leads to more intense fires beyond what happens in a natural forest (i.e. one were fire routinely thins out available fuels before it builds up excessively).
I'm not denying the climate change, I'm embracing it! As for fires, it is obvious that 'green' practices stopping small forest fires result only in building up fuel and inevitable BIG fires. It is time to accept that forest fires are natural part of forest life cycle and that it is even advisable to do a profilactic burns form time to time.
The landscapes are undergoing desertification. Where 200 years ago it may have been a prime environment to grow a new forest, and an existing forest could endure, growing a new forest is not likely to succeed due to temperature/water availability.
Under your given time span of “hundreds of millions of years” I assume essentially square inch of land underwent desertification at some point, if it wasn’t buried beneath the sea. I mean, there weren’t even trees before 385 million years ago.
I experienced the brutal heat wave that hit the Bay Area in 2020, along with awful wildfires and started smoking 1 cigarette a day. My thinking was, if the climate is this bad now (2020), it's going to be significantly worse by 2050.
This isn't to say one shouldn't take care of their body, I go to the gym 2-3 times and a week and do lots of cycling.
The fact about how many old trees have died in the last century saddens me in a peculiar way.
Is the climate bad now? The human population is at its peak, living standards are way better than ever, so it would seem that the current climate is just fine (for humans at least).
It’s worse than it was 5 years ago. I’ve lived in the bay for ~15 years now, you did not used to need air filters for ~several weeks to months out of the year.
Population size and living standards are lagging indicators for sustainability. As it is though things are not just fine right now in the sense that conditions are such that that the unstoppable change they induce will soon be so bad that not even the willfully ignorant can deny things.
this is true for the Western Sierra mountains also.. but a big catch is, the Western Sierras and the Eastern Colorado Rockies are carefully studied by competent people with excellent equipment, while vast stretches of northern forests in other parts of the world, are similarly suffering (fires) but with very little detail available. Geopolitics interferes as the political governments are rivals.
Such is the times we live in. The world is literly burning down, and taking out the coral and oceans with it and there will still be people citing the doctrine of Resource extracting industries that they are not to blame.
If you think crypto is a bubble, then the resource game was the first of its kind. Promise of riches for all that end up getting funneled into the pockets of a few at the expense of all others is the name of progress.
The largest most profitable companies in this world exploit nature & poor communities, turning them into money and influence with alarming efficency.
"When trees fail to regenerate after a fire, new plants take their place. To generalize, in the northern Rocky Mountains, it’s a mix of grasses and shrubs of the genus ceanothus — like snowbrush. In parts of the Southwest, juniper and oak savannas replace pine forests. In New Mexico, thorny locusts often dominate. In northern California, its dense hip to head-high thickets of manzanita and ceanothus. The general trend: fewer forests, more shrublands."
I think we are going to have to put more wood behind fewer arrowheads by concentrating human restoration effort on quality over quantity. More intensely restoring tree cover to smaller areas, strategically chosen not just for convenience (access) but also for how and where it can spread on its own. Trees together collaborate on building forest, especially if there are a few older trees to serve as figurative scaffolding.
If we don't know, we can study how far away an 'island' of trees can be from an intact stand and still draw mammals, birds, insects, pollen, spores, etc, across different terrains, watersheds, and seasonal winds. The animals bring plants with them, and we can 'hire' them just like plants do, if we set up the same kinds of incentives.
There was a video I watched years ago that I lament not making a bookmark for. In a restoration in SE Asia they factored bird services into the equation. They planted a handful of species of plants that the birds liked for forage, and then waited for the birds to bring in other fruits on their own. At the time I think they were looking at around 2x as many species as they had planted, and I believe they expected that to continue as the forage season was expanded by each new plant that arrived.
There's been some talk about how the 'sustainable forestry' practices we've been doing are going to reveal themselves to have been a fiction after the next lumber harvest. I can't help but think this is showing up now in the results, and global warming has accomplices.
We also have known for some time that forests heal faster from the edges in, and as we've learned more about what goes on below the soil the evidence just stacks up for it. Unprescribed fires aren't just more intense, they're also bigger. We are going to have to start factoring all of this into our land management practices, and apply it to any restoration work.
totally agree about the soil health and (implied) biodiversity in regeneration. Unfortunately, some recent studies show that heavy herbicide applications improve the tree growth in the near (10 year) term. Lots of companies (Bayer/US/Planet) want to sell herbicides and genetically engineered solutions. (sad face)
It was the cycling of tree cover and bare, disturbed and compacted earth that was the problem, not the pesticides in particular. Just like cropland, we are eating up the topsoil and leaving less for the next generation of trees.
Biomes are changing and it's our fault. Planting trees won't virtual signal our way out of climate change when there's too much CO2 in the air, not enough rain, and too much heat. If I hear any more about planting trees somehow magically sequestering carbon, I'm going to scream into the void until my eyes bleed.
One of the primary scalable ways to fix the atmosphere is to use oceanic bio CSS by growing gigatons of kelp and/or phytoplankton, and sinking it to where it's more-or-less permanently sequestered. Floating automated kelp farms and processing stations could make this happen.
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[ 0.17 ms ] story [ 180 ms ] thread> Even after 15 years post-fire, 80% of the surveyed plots contained no new trees.
So 20% did, why?
> Global warming has contributed to a doubling of the number of acres burned across the country since the 1990s.
While I agree that climate change is real, so is mismanagement of our forests. Which is to blame most?
Frankly, the use of the phrase Global Warming (instead of the more accurate and more accepted Climate Change) makes we suspect of the strength of the argument.
Part of the reason for the current state of things is mismanagement through blanket fire prevention. Another part is things like pine beetle in colorado and new mexico killing millions of acres of trees because of warmer temperatures associated with climate change, and that wood drying out for years in the desert air.
So what I'm saying is that we won't even have been the first species to have done so.
It does sound contradictory when said like this imo. Isn't plant growth the whole point of a greenhouse?
Uh, no. Egypt was desert when the Pyramids were built. Egyptian civilization existed (and still does) in a narrow ribbon along the Nile; the Pyramids of Giza are only about five miles from it. They're certainly not in the middle of nowhere, that's just the camera angles working. (See https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/94/Giza-pyr... for an alternative view.)
Pictures of the Pyramid of Djoser (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/Saqqara_...) look like it's in the middle of nowhere, but it's four miles from the Nile, too, and only two thousand feet away from fertile farmland.
Meidum? Again, four miles from the Nile and 800 feet from farms, despite photos looking like https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/81/02_meidu....
Could be that we were just wrong about how quickly growth restarts after a fire.
Logging practices over the past two hundred years have had big impacts on how the forest ecology works: what trees grow, what animals and insects live there and how much floor litter there is. All of this has an impact on whether a fire comes through and sterilizes the soil or leaves it fertile.
There was immense pressure for the forest service to support logging and grazing, both of which dramatically alter the landscape.
Another complication is that the native Americans in the area had their own silviculture practice that optimized for their own needs (by and large not lumber), so pre-white historical guides aren’t necessarily “natural” either.
So the forests always regrew, but then we changed them (and stopped allowing fires). In the meanwhile the environment changed as we pumped more carbon into the atmosphere. Now when we reintroduce fire the results are different.
The fire intensities are much higher due to various factors. This kills more of the mature trees and alters the soil nutrient composition such that it become water repellent.
The same effects have been noted in Australian mega-fires over the past decade.
Under your given time span of “hundreds of millions of years” I assume essentially square inch of land underwent desertification at some point, if it wasn’t buried beneath the sea. I mean, there weren’t even trees before 385 million years ago.
This isn't to say one shouldn't take care of their body, I go to the gym 2-3 times and a week and do lots of cycling.
The fact about how many old trees have died in the last century saddens me in a peculiar way.
Is the climate bad now? The human population is at its peak, living standards are way better than ever, so it would seem that the current climate is just fine (for humans at least).
https://www.noaa.gov/news/2020-was-earth-s-2nd-hottest-year-...
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21100767-venado-decl...
shout out to SKYLAB Precision Forestry who are doing excellent, cutting edge work based in Hamburg, Germany
None of the citations or claims in this article look reputable.
If you think crypto is a bubble, then the resource game was the first of its kind. Promise of riches for all that end up getting funneled into the pockets of a few at the expense of all others is the name of progress.
The largest most profitable companies in this world exploit nature & poor communities, turning them into money and influence with alarming efficency.
For example, California has lost ~26% of its forest cover since 2000 https://www.globalforestwatch.org/map/country/USA/5/?mainMap...
Tree cover gain - 2001-2012
Tree cover loss - 2001-2020
These are not even close to the same period length. They don't seem to have an actually comparable option in their choices.
"When trees fail to regenerate after a fire, new plants take their place. To generalize, in the northern Rocky Mountains, it’s a mix of grasses and shrubs of the genus ceanothus — like snowbrush. In parts of the Southwest, juniper and oak savannas replace pine forests. In New Mexico, thorny locusts often dominate. In northern California, its dense hip to head-high thickets of manzanita and ceanothus. The general trend: fewer forests, more shrublands."
(also, https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2021/07/19/california-fir...)
If we don't know, we can study how far away an 'island' of trees can be from an intact stand and still draw mammals, birds, insects, pollen, spores, etc, across different terrains, watersheds, and seasonal winds. The animals bring plants with them, and we can 'hire' them just like plants do, if we set up the same kinds of incentives.
There was a video I watched years ago that I lament not making a bookmark for. In a restoration in SE Asia they factored bird services into the equation. They planted a handful of species of plants that the birds liked for forage, and then waited for the birds to bring in other fruits on their own. At the time I think they were looking at around 2x as many species as they had planted, and I believe they expected that to continue as the forage season was expanded by each new plant that arrived.
We also have known for some time that forests heal faster from the edges in, and as we've learned more about what goes on below the soil the evidence just stacks up for it. Unprescribed fires aren't just more intense, they're also bigger. We are going to have to start factoring all of this into our land management practices, and apply it to any restoration work.
That may not be the unalloyed good news it's portrayed as, especially where forests are concerned.
> Even after 15 years post-fire, 80% of the surveyed plots contained no new trees.
> From 1900 to 2015 the world lost more than a third of its old-growth forests.
We are going to quite literally burn this planet to the ground before the end of the century.
One of the primary scalable ways to fix the atmosphere is to use oceanic bio CSS by growing gigatons of kelp and/or phytoplankton, and sinking it to where it's more-or-less permanently sequestered. Floating automated kelp farms and processing stations could make this happen.