Federal land management agencies throughout the nation are offering a festive way for residents to reduce wildfire risk.
The USFS Christmas Tree Permit program gives people an opportunity to discover the national forests in interesting ways, while offering a Christmas tree at a cheap price. The agency lists 80 permit areas for forests from California to New Hampshire, each contributing to forest thinning programs.
The BLM also sells permits for trees, both online and in-person. The permit is valid through December 25. Check at forestproducts.blm.gov and search for your area; cost per tree permit is $5 and a map and permit will be provided.
“For every tree that is found, cut and carried home as a holiday fixture, you’re also contributing to overall forest health,” according to the recreation.gov page. “Christmas tree permits are an opportunity for citizens to help thin densely populated stands of small-diameter trees – the perfect size for a Christmas tree.”
Forest thinning, or reducing the fuels beneath a forest’s tree canopy, contributes to a forest’s health by reducing resource competition. Trees growing too close together have to compete for nutrients, water, and sunlight, leading to weaker trees that are more susceptible to disease, insect infestations, or drought. These weaker trees can also contribute to future wildfire spread.
Western conifer forests have a historic relationship with fire. Fires long have burned the understory of forests, clearing out smaller brush and low branches. Modern-day treatments such as forest thinning and prescribed fire, replicate these historic fires by removing brush, lower tree limbs, and smaller trees (many of which make perfect Christmas trees).
BLM Christmas tree program
“Venturing into a local national forest to find that special tree is an experience that creates treasured family memories and stories,” said U.S. Forest Service Chief Randy Moore. “It is through these experiences that people establish important connections to the forest that can lead to a lifetime of adventures and instill a commitment to stewardship.”
Permits from the USFS usually run $10 to $15. Check here to buy a permit from a national forest near you.
The annual Christmas tree market is one of the ways that a profitable “small tree market” can create carbon-beneficial forest management. Berkeley research from 2021 found that promoting innovative uses of wood residues can support extensive wildfire hazard reduction and maximize carbon benefits in California’s forests. Read the full scientific article here.
12/16/2023 — Update from California: The nice folks on the Stanislaus had to go rescue a Tesla cyber-truck driver who was out looking for a tree. The video would make a nice ad for Ford trucks. WATCH IT HERE.
The elements themselves were taken from the Yurok Tribe when the federal government forced them onto a northern California reservation in 1855.
Gone was the earth of the tribe’s ancestral lands. Gone were the salmon-filled waters the tribe had relied on. Gone was the tribe’s access to cultural burning. And, earlier this year, the tribe even lost access to its air.
On the evening of August 15, the Six Rivers National Forest was hit with 150 lightning strikes that ignited 27 confirmed fires, according to inciweb. A dozen of those fires were ignited in Del Norte County, fires that would later be managed together as the Smith River Complex.
Smoke from the complex drifted down onto the town of Klamath on the Yurok Reservation, according to Arizona Republic reporter Debra Utacia Krol. The town’s air would go on to acquire the unmistakable odor of gas-powered generators after the local utility shut power off in fears of sparking another wildfire.
Smith River Complex, Mad River Hotshots, inciweb photo
The Smith River Complex would burn 95,107 acres before it was 100 percent contained nearly two months later on October 13. The complex’s BAER team assessment estimated that ~49 percent of the area’s soil was burned at either a moderate or a high severity. The assessment also found that multiple watersheds in the area were severely burned. While the fire didn’t burn on the Yurok Reservation itself, it stands as one of the many reasons the tribe is pushing to reclaim its elements.
In 2013, the tribe formed the Cultural Fire Management Council to keep alive the practice of cultural burning on the Yurok Reservation and ancestral lands. The group partners with numerous agencies and nonprofits, including the USFS, Cal Fire, and the Nature Conservancy.
Cultural Fire Management Council [CulturalFire.org] photoThe council pushes toward its goal through fuels reduction, cooperative burns, and returning the freedom to burn back to individual families and property owners on the reservation. The council also offers numerous workshops and trainings to get more people involved in cultural and managed fire.
“We’ve been suppressing fire and really, what we’ve been doing is suppressing this critical piece of who we are as humans,” the group’s treasurer and cultural fire practitioner Elizabeth Azzuz told High Country News. “Fire isn’t something apart from us. Fire is family.”
The tribe is also working to reclaim its waters by leading the largest dam removal project in U.S. history. Over the next year, four dams along the Klamath River will be deconstructed and removed as part of a 20-year effort by river advocates and tribal members to stop the devastation of the river’s salmon population. The deconstruction of the first dam occurred in early November.
Copco
The recent wins contribute to a sense of the tribe’s reclaiming agency over its natural resources for the betterment of the land and the tribe’s members.
“We’ve been talking and begging about doing this for so long, just spinning our wheels,” Yurok Forestry Director Dawn Blake told the Associated Press. “It feels like we’re finally being heard.”
Around 90 percent of all people exposed to wildfires over the past 23 years lived in either California, Oregon, or Washington. Among those, researchers found a disproportionate number were poor, a racial minority, disabled, or over the age of 65.
A recent study examined the “social vulnerability” of the people exposed to wildfires over the last two decades. Social vulnerability describes how persons with certain social, economic, or demographic traits were more susceptible to harm from hazards including wildfires or other natural disasters.
From 2000 to 2021, the number of people in the western United States who lived in fire-affected areas increased by 185 percent, while structure losses from wildfires increased by 246 percent. The vulnerability of the people living there, however, isn’t well known despite these populations potentially never recovering after a disaster strikes.
Researchers asked whether highly vulnerable people were disproportionately exposed to wildfire, how vulnerability has changed over the past 20 years, whether population changes before a fire alter the vulnerability of the population, and whether social vulnerability of people exposed to fires was equal among states.
Each of the three West Coast states recorded disproportionate wildfire exposure of the socially vulnerable; Oregon and Washington had more than 40 percent of their exposed population being highly vulnerable while California had around 8 percent of of those exposed considered highly vulnerable. The most vulnerable populations were also those with low income, while age, minority status, and disability also affected populations’ ability to cope after wildfire.
The number of highly vulnerable people exposed to fire in the three states also increased by 249 percent over the past two decades. An increase in social vulnerability of populations in burned areas was the main contributor to increased exposure in California, while Oregon and Washington saw wildfires increasingly encroaching on vulnerable population areas.
“Our analysis highlights the need to increase understanding of the social characteristics that affect vulnerability, to inform effective mitigation and adaptation strategies,” the study said. “Particular attention to residents who are older, living with a disability, living in group quarters, and with limited English-speaking skills may be warranted, and cultural differences need to be addressed for effective policy development and response.”
Other research published earlier this year, The Path of Flames: Understanding and Responding to Fatal Wildfires, found unequal access and assistance could also play a role in who survives and who dies during catastrophic wildfires. In the study, researchers found that for many of the Paradise, California residents who died in the 2018 Camp Fire, the inability to evacuate on their own was a major factor in their deaths.
Wildfires don’t “destroy” the landscapes they burn through.
Wildfires can kill trees, vegetation, and occasionally wildlife. Flames can burn down homes and businesses in towns and neighborhoods. They can even level entire city blocks.
But wildfires don’t “destroy” acres of land. More often than not, fire paves the way for something new to take root; to grow back.
A new thing has taken root in the burn scar of southern California’s 2021 Windy Fire. The lightning-caused wildfire, which burned just north of the 2016 Cedar Fire east of Porterville, burned nearly 100,000 acres of the Tule River Indian Reservation and the Sequoia National Forest, killing an estimated 3 to 5 percent of the world’s giant sequoia population.
Windy Fire burn scar, NPS photo
A keystone species — an organism that helps define an entire ecosystem — is calling the fire area home again, 150 years after being hunted and driven out. A pack of gray wolves, one adult female and four cubs, has been seen in the area, according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW). The pack is officially the state’s southernmost wolf pack and is more than 200 miles from the nearest separate wolf pack.
“CDFW investigated the reported location, found wolf tracks and other signs of wolf presence, and collected 12 scat and hair samples from the immediate area for genetic testing,” according to the agency. “The new pack consists of at least one adult female, who is a direct descendant of California’s first documented wolf in the state in recent history.”
This image is the first photo of the pack’s adult female:
Southern California wolf photo by Michelle Harris, Colibri Ecological Consulting
While the wolves’ return to the area is historically and ecologically significant, wolves finding home in a burn scar is reportedly a common occurrence, according to an article from Scientific American.
A lack of trees allows more sunlight to hit the soil and causes plants to sprout. The plants attract deer and other species, offering wolves ample eating opportunities. Burn scars can also act as prime den sites for wolves, with clear forests offering less obstructed views of their surroundings, intruders, and predators. And wolves aren’t the only animals to take advantage of a post-wildfire landscape.
“Other animals, such as wild turkeys, are attracted to areas soon after fire because they forage on seeds and invertebrates on the ground in the blackened areas,” said Chris Moorman, a professor of fisheries, wildlife and conservation biology at NC State University. Low-intensity prescribed fires can also increase abundance and diversity of certain plant species in forest understories.
In 1993, District Manager John Koehler was in the midst of a shift in popular fire management practices. In his position with the Florida Forest Service (then the Division of Forestry) he’d noticed a new trend developing among the country’s wildfire managers, but he found there was little data to support their claims. So he decided to conduct a study to either verify or debunk the usefulness of prescribed burns.
Koehler wasn’t the first to gain interest in whether the historical practice of prescribed burning was as effective as people claimed. Fire Scientist Robert Martin, in his 1988 study, found that prescribed burning reduced the number of acres burned per wildfire, but said the practice’s effect on wildfire occurrence was “at best, speculative.” Forester James Kerr Brown, in his 1989 study, said a prescribed burning program would not have prevented the disastrous Yellowstone fires that had burned the year before.
1998 Yellowstone ~ NPS photo
Koehler was less than impressed by either study. He wanted to learn whether prescribed fires held quantifiable, tangible benefits – which neither study supplied. To compile hard data, Koehler used nine years’ worth of Florida Forest Service fire statistics to determine whether prescribed burns were affecting the frequency and size of wildfires at all. His study would go on to produce the hard data he was looking for, concluding that in every area where prescribed burns occurred, decreases were recorded in the total number of wildfires, the number of acres burned, and the average number of acres burned per wildfire.
“Prescribed burning will not eliminate wildfires, but this practice does reduce the threat posed from wildfires,” Koehler said.
At the end of his study, he recommended more research focused on quantifying benefits of prescribed burning as a prevention tool. Fast-forward 30 years, and Koehler would get his wish after a team of researchers on the other side of the country completed one of the most comprehensive examinations of prescribed burns’ effect on future wildfires.
The new research, “Low-intensity fires mitigate the risk of high-intensity wildfires in California’s forests,” was published in the journal Science by Biostatistician Xiao Wu from Columbia University and a team of Stanford researchers. In the study, the team analyzed 20 years of satellite data on fire activity across more than 62,000 miles of California forests to determine whether intentional low-intensity burns mitigate the consequences of the increasing frequency of severe wildfires.
Their conclusions were the same that Koehler had heard wildfire managers espousing decades before: prescribed
burns help prevent future wildfires.
In conifer forests, they found, areas that have recently burned at low intensity are 64 percent less likely to burn at high intensity in the following year relative to unburned synthetic control areas – and this protective effect against high-intensity fires persists for at least 6 years.
Prescribed burn ~ NPS photo
The study not only found prescribed burns widely successful in California, but also showed that they’re a necessary practice vital to conifer forests’ health, something Native American tradition has known for centuries.
The study does not shy away from referencing previous case studies that indicate frequent and low-intensity fires were the norm before the forceful removal of numerous Native American tribes from California. Previous research from Ecologist Alan Taylor shows that fire regime changes over the past 400 years likely resulted from socioecological changes rather than climate changes. Fire Scientist Scott Stephens found around 4.4 million acres of California had burned annually before 1800, in part helped by Native American cultural burning. Geographer Clarke Knight determined that indigenous burning practices promoted long-term forest stability in the forests of California’s Klamath Mountains for at least one millennium.
“The resilience of western North American forests depends critically on the presence of fire at intervals and at intensities that approximate presuppression and precolonial conditions that existed prior to the extirpation of Native Americans from ancestral territories in California,” Wu wrote.
RxFire training, Grand Canyon National Park ~ NPS photo
The research led the study’s authors to recommend a continuation of the policy transition from fire suppression to restoration – through the usage of prescribed fire, cultural burning, and managed wildfire. The maximum benefits a prescribed fire program can yield, however, are dependent on whether the practice becomes a sustained tradition. If sustained, prescribed burning could have an ongoing protective effect on nearly 4,000 square miles of California’s forests.
Getting to that point would require many more resources. As pointed out in Fire Scientist Crystal Kolden’s 2018 research, management practices in the West have still failed to wholeheartedly adopt and increase prescribed burning despite calls from scientists and policy experts, including the 30-year-old call from Koehler.
The result is the continual compounding
of the ongoing fire deficit.
“Federal funding for prescribed fire and other fuel reduction activities has been drastically depleted over the past two decades as large wildfires force federal agencies to expend allocated funds on suppression rather than prevention,” said Kolden.
She also gave a well-deserved shoutout to fire managers in the Southeast U.S., crediting them with accomplishing double the number of prescribed burns compared with the entire rest of the U.S. between 1998 and 2018. “This may be one of many reasons the Southeastern states have experienced far fewer wildfire disasters relative to the Western U.S. in recent years,” Kolden said.
Even as the USFS and other federal agencies continue to tout prescribed burns in their national strategies, it won’t be until the agencies collectively create policy changes and budgetary allocations sufficient that prescribed burning is used at a scale in which it can create meaningful prevention. Without those meaningful changes, the wealth of prescribed burn research clearly shows that more catastrophic wildfire disasters are inevitable.
A “super fog” is blanketing the New Orleans area, worsening vehicle crashes and causing health concerns among residents. The weather phenomenon has been blamed for numerous traffic incidents including a series of horrific crashes in late October involving 158 vehicles that left seven people dead and 25 injured.
But attempts to douse a nearby wildfire may actually be making the super fog worse.
A 200-acre wildfire burning near the Bayou Sauvage Urban National Wildlife Refuge has been fully contained for weeks, but residents have told local media that “noxious smoke” from the fire is causing a harsh chemical-like odor. The uniquely foul-smelling smoke is caused, in part, by the fire’s underground burning.
Bayou Sauvage NWR
“Your usual marsh fire is on dry brush and grass, and it burns fast and has a sweet smell,” the New Orleans Fire Department told the Times-Picayune. “But when it gets into that stuff underground, that’s rotting vegetation. And yes, it starts stinking.”
The stink may be gaining potency because of firefighters’ suppression efforts. They are working with the state Department of Agriculture and Forestry, the city’s Sewerage & Water Board, and the Army Corps of Engineers to drive drainage canal water to flood the swamp where the wildfire is burning.
The City of New Orleans’ Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness said the flooding is a last-ditch effort, with few other above-the-surface suppression efforts having any effect on extinguishing the fire. But, as more water is poured on the fire, more smoke rises.
“As you put water on some areas, you do experience more smoke coming up,” New Orleans Fire Department Superintendent Roman Nelson told the newspaper.
Vegetation in swamps and wetlands have a higher than average fuel moisture content, which requires more energy to drive off the water and increases emissions, i.e. smoke, per unit of fuel consumed, the FS Smoke Management Guide said. The last-resort flooding is, albeit temporarily, increasing the fuel moisture content and the noxious emissions.
Firefighters say it’s difficult to estimate just how much of the fire has been extinguished since the ground absorbs so much of the flooding, but they believe around 20 percent of the fire is now out.
