Humans started fighting wildfires, and for decades we were pretty successful. That resulted in more fuel buildup then happened historically.
When those fire finally burn, they often burn hot enough to destroy trees that used to survive the fires.
I don’t know what the fuel levels were in this area specifically, but yes, it seems plausible that the brush might not have built up to today’s levels before.
I wonder what the quantifiable overall effect is.
> We’re seeing recurrent fires in tall, wet eucalypt forests, which normally only burn very rarely. A swamp dried out near Port Macquarie, and organic sediments in the ground caught on fire. When you drop the water table, the soil is so rich in organic matter it will burn. We’ve seen swamps burning all around.
> Even Australia’s fire-adapted forest ecosystems are struggling because they are facing increasingly frequent events. In Tasmania, over the past few years we have seen environments burning that historically see fires very rarely, perhaps every 1000 years. __The increasing tempo, spatial scale, and frequency of fires could see ecosystems extinguished.__
Worsened {frequency, intensity, drought conditions, ...} in fire seasons can be catastrophic even to those environments traditionally considered stable under such pressure.
[1]: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/11/massive-australian-b...
I'm glad I had the chance to visit this park last year, but also sad to see its apocalyptic state on top of everything else that already happened this year.
[1] https://www.ktvu.com/news/californias-oldest-state-park-big-...
[2] https://s3-media0.fl.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/_aLLH1G53QxyzKCleBGw...
When other trees are burned away is when the Redwoods multiply and take over abandoned land.
"One very important adaptation for the coast redwood is its thick bark with deep grooves running vertically along the tree. It is this bark that gives the redwoods their fire-resistant characteristic. Older trees are able to survive fires because their bark is so thick and acts as a fireproof shell."
From: http://bioweb.uwlax.edu/bio203/s2009/hemmeric_nata/Adaptatio....
"Still, Ms. Barth said there was reason to be optimistic about the fate of the trees.
'They’re meant to resist and even thrive in response to wildfires,' she said. 'If any place is going to be able to withstand this conflagration it’s Big Basin.'"
>Big Basin, in particular, has benefited from the longest, continuous program of prescribed burning anywhere in the state since the purposeful burning done by indigenous people who tended this landscape for thousands of years.
That's the main thing that's missing from modern forest management by most accounts. Reading that gave me a hell of a lot more confidence that the trees are probably mostly safe, even if pretty much everything else has been wiped out.
Most of our pine species have evolved to burn every few decades. During these burns, a fire sweeps through the forest floor, killing most of the trees which have cropped up since the previous fire but haven’t had time to mature. The older, taller trees survive because their characteristic thick, flaky bark protects their trunks from the heat of the burn (interestingly, the smoke from the burn causes the cones in the taller trees to open up and fall into the freshly carbonized soil, creating the next batch of seedlings). The younger trees don’t have this yet, and anyway they usually aren’t tall enough to keep their branches out of the fire, which leads to the major issue here.
Fire prevention over the last hundred years has resulted in forests with a wide mix of trees at various canopy heights, which fire ecologists have taken to calling ladder fuels, because the trees are taller than the saplings which would usually be cleared out and shorter than old growth trees, providing a “ladder” for fire to jump into the canopies of older forests. These forests are not in any way whatsoever equipped to deal with canopy burns. All of their fire defenses are near the ground, in the bark, and there’s a high likelihood that once the fire reaches the canopy it will at least kill the tree, if not spread through the canopy and destroy the forest.
It goes without saying that the physics involved here, when the fire is burning from the ground up to hundreds of feet in the air and consuming all of the available fuel, are magnitudes different than a typical brush fire on the forest floor. While these fires weren’t impossible in prior to the emergence of forest management practices, those practices have unambiguously resulted in more and more severe fires by increasing the volume and density of fuels in these forests.
To that end, I wouldn’t be all that surprised if the fire really has consumed all of Big Basin.
As he says in one of the tweets, "More redwoods near Big Basin park, appear to have made it but as Mercury News environment reporter @PaulRogersSJMN points out, fire prevention for years means lots of fuel that could threaten even fire-resistant redwoods including ancient ones in park interior" [1].
Clearly a number of the larger trees aren't going to survive this [2][3][4][5].
I see statements about "wildfire being a part of the natural cycle" pretty often but it seems to stem from a misunderstanding about the different scales of wildfire. Smaller, cooler, more frequent brush fires were a part of California ecology in some areas; modern wildfires are far hotter and more destructive and are killing vast swaths of forests that have previously survived for hundreds or thousands of years.
There's an arboretum just outside Eugene, Oregon that does a nice job of talking about fire's historical role in the local ecology, and the Oregon Garden just outside Silverton also has a section dedicated to walking through different kinds of forest ecologies and explaining which plant species flourish as a result of different management strategies. The unmanaged, fire-suppressed forests are terribly vulnerable to wildfire as well as stress from pests and competition.
I also took a few photos just a couple of weeks ago of a once-forested area that had burned over 20 years ago. It's still dead.
My first visits to Big Basin were at least 35 years ago and I don't know how to express how saddened I am by this news.
[1]: https://twitter.com/ethanbaron/status/1296547748259360768
[2]: https://twitter.com/ethanbaron/status/1296640252279312384/ph...
[3]: https://twitter.com/ethanbaron/status/1296640967299063809/ph...
[4]: https://twitter.com/ethanbaron/status/1296641416802656256/ph...
[5]: https://twitter.com/ethanbaron/status/1296643324275593216/ph...
But, if the surrounding fuels have been exhausted, likely the worst of it is over in that area.