Plenty of Southwestern forests and grasslands are still ripe for wildfires.
Whether this will be another year like last and hundreds of thousands more acres will go up in smoke is dependent on spring moisture, temperatures and wind, according to fire ecologists gathered at the four-day Southwest Fire Conference that ends today in Santa Fe.
And even if big fires happen, they're not all bad, researchers say.
Fire ecologists met with fire and land managers from several Western states to share their thoughts on lessons learned from last year's historic fire season and talk about what's to come.
While parts of the Southwest had some winter moisture in a normally dry La Nina year -- when sea surface temperatures in the Eastern Pacific around the equator are cooler than normal -- spring is likely to remain dry, said Julio Betancourt, a renowned U.S. Geological Survey climate change researcher from Tucson, Ariz. "My feeling is we're going to see more fire than usual, which is typical of La Nina years," he said.
Betancourt said it's already been a "weird" fire year. "When you see fires burning on the outskirts of Reno in November and January, that's relatively unusual," he said.
Craig Allen, a USGS fire ecologist stationed at Bandelier National Monument, said fire risks vary across the Southwest region, depending on altitude and landscape.
The Eastern New Mexico mountain chain and Texas plains could see fewer fires this year because millions of acres already burned, and because the lack of moisture since last fall means there is less grass to fuel new fires.
In the mountains, a lot of chunks of forest haven't burned yet, Martin said. A century of fire suppression coupled with a wet period from the 1970s to mid-1990s gave rise to the dense mountain forests now prone to large wildfires during drought.
Wildfires, and cycles of moisture and drought, are part of the Southwest's history dating back thousands of years based on tree ring data, Allen said. What has changed, due to human influence, is where wildfires occur and how big they burn. Whether the fires are helpful to the landscape, or harmful, depends on where they burn. "There's not one size fits all. Landscapes are very diverse in the Southwest," Allen said.
Ponderosa pine forests once burned frequently, but with low intensity. Fires burned out smaller trees, brush and fallen needles, a sort of house cleaning in the forest. Larger pines endured the fires and carried on.
Wildfires were rare in the lowland deserts of Southern New Mexico and Arizona, Betancourt said. Ranchers and land managers introduced non-native grasses decades ago to provide livestock browse or reduce erosion. The grasses took over and now feed furiously fast-moving wildfires.
Fire scientists and fire managers increasingly work hand in hand to figure out where they want wildfires and where they don't. Once a wildfire starts, letting it burn out naturally can be helpful, as long as the fire isn't threatening homes, businesses or other resources. Letting a wildfire burn can be the least expensive, fastest way to restore the kind of landscape that existed before people began changing it -- and ultimately protect the communities that keep expanding into wild lands. "The use of fire at the landscape level is going to be the biggest bang for the buck," said Andi Thode, associate professor of fire ecology and fire science at Northern Arizona University.
Fire ecologists say fire-restored landscapes may also be the best way to help forests, grasslands and the communities within them, prepare for the long-term trend of warming temperatures and longer droughts due to climate change.
Copyright 2012 - The Santa Fe New Mexican
McClatchy-Tribune News Service
