A report has been released by the Joint Fire Science Program that looks at the potential effects of climate change on the vegetation and fire regime in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. The entire report, Climate, Fire and Carbon:Tipping Points in Greater Yellowstone, can be found HERE. Below are some highlights provided by the Joint Fire Science Program.
How great a change in climate and fire regimes would be required to shift each of the dominant vegetation communities in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) from a net carbon sink to a net carbon source?
Do current projections indicate that changes of this magnitude are likely to occur in the next century, and if so, where in the GYE do they occur?
What are the integrated effects of climate change, vegetation , and fire on spatial patterns of carbon flux across the GYE landscape as a whole?
RESULTS:
Fire incidence and size are very sensitive to small (0.5 – 1 °C) increases over average temperatures of the late 20th century.
Modeled climate scenarios predict that large severe forest fires are likely to become far more frequent over the next century than experienced during the previous 100 years or recorded in the longer historical record.
Fire intervals of 90 years or longer are needed for recovery of carbon stocks under future climate scenarios.
More frequent fires mean that mature and old-growth forests will be increasingly replaced by young forests or even by non-forest vegetation during this century. It is also possible that fire frequency could preclude tree regeneration in some areas,.
Fire control likely will become increasingly difficult and expensive, especially in high-elevation conifer forests where fuel conditions commonly are conducive to extreme fire behavior under very dry weather conditions.
Continued or enhanced programs of proactive mitigation (e.g., mechanical thinning, prescribed burning, land-use regulations) will be needed to reduce fire hazards to buildings and infrastructure.
An ancient cypress forest has been discovered at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico 60 feet under water about 10 miles off the coast of Alabama. An examination of samples from the trees using radiocarbon dating estimated that they are over 50,000 years old. The wood is remarkably well preserved and has the distinct aroma of cypress when it is sawn, researchers said.
The fact that the trees are under water is due to changing sea levels caused by ice ages coming and going and the land mass in southern Alabama rising and subsiding over the last 50,000 to 80,000 years.
Scientists think massive waves during Hurricane Katrina rearranged the sand and silt on the ocean floor, uncovering the forest after it had been hidden for eons.
The United States government is taking steps leading toward open access to the results of taxpayer-funded scientific research. Too often researchers pay privately owned scientific journals “page charges” to publish their findings, which then are sold back to taxpayers in the form of subscriptions which cost hundreds or thousands of dollars a year or more than $30 to read one paper if you don’t have a subscription.
At least partially in response to an on-line petition at the White House web site which received over 65,000 signatures (including mine), the administration issued a memorandum today that increases access to research. It helps, but is not an ideal solution. The new procedures require agencies that spend more than $100 million annually on research to develop plans to make the results of federally-funded research publically available free of charge within 12 months after original publication. While that is better than keeping it secret or making taxpayers pay twice for the data, 12 months is too long. It should be much shorter, say, 3 or 6 months after appearing in a journal. In addition, ALL research should be available to the public, not just research funded by agencies that spend more than $100 million on R&D.
For the last three years Congress has dithered about the issue, doing little until last week when a bill was introduced, theFair Access to Science and Technology Research Act, which would force the public release of journal articles within six months of publication. It also only applies to agencies that spend more than $100 million a year on R&D.
The for-profit Elsevier corporation headquartered in the Netherlands has published papers on wildland fire research written by government employees, and vehemently opposes the bill, according to an article in the Washington Post. In fact, in 2011 Elsevier backed a bill that would quash open access to scientific articles. The bill died after it encountered serious opposition.
At Wildfire Today we have ranted about this for the last couple of years (tag: open access), and it’s heart-warming to see some progress is being made.
The federal government of Australia will stop funding bushfire research. The Bushfire Co-operative Research Centre has never received continuous annual funding but has been provided funds on a project by project basis. Shutting down the Centre would be similar to the United States government closing the Fire Sciences Laboratories in Missoula and Riverside.
Here is an excerpt from an article in the Canberra Times:
…The ACT government is frustrated at the move to cut off money for the Bushfire Co-operative Research Centre, when bushfires are not completely understood and continue to take lives and damage property.
The centre’s chief executive, Gary Morgan, warned that fires would get worse as the climate changed.
Investigators from the Melbourne-based Bushfire CRC are being dispatched this week to study recent fires near Yass and Goulburn.
The centre is funded on a project-by-project basis by the Commonwealth, with funding also from state and territory governments, as well as universities and other partners.
NSW Premier Barry O’Farrell criticised the federal government’s decision to stop funding the centre.
”This reckless cut makes no sense given the extent of the bushfire damage this summer here in NSW and right around the country,” he said on Sunday. ”There can be absolutely no doubt advances in bushfire-fighting technology saved homes and lives during the recent bushfire crises.”
He said the centre’s work had included raising understanding of extreme fire behaviour, better protecting firefighters and improving prescribed burning strategies.
The centre was set up after major Canberra and Sydney fires 10 years ago and assisted Victoria’s royal commission after Black Saturday.
From National Academy of Sciences. Map of changes in area burned for a 1ºC increase in global average temperature, shown as the percentage change relative to the median annual area burned during 1950-2003. Results are aggregated to ecoprovinces (Bailey, 1995) of the West. Changes in temperature and precipitation were aggregated to the ecoprovince level. Climate-fire models were derived from NCDC climate division records and observed area burned data following methods described in Littell et al. (2009). Source: Figure from Rob Norheim.
Most of us have heard the predictions that climate change and higher temperatures will increase the number of acres burned in wildfires. But I experienced a Holy Crap moment when I saw the map above that illustrates where those changes will occur and by how much. According to a National Academy of Sciences paper titled Climate stabilization targets: emissions, concentrations, and impacts over decades to millennia, a 1°C increase in global average temperature will cause the annual area burned in the western United States to rise from 74 percent to 656 percent relative to the median annual area burned during 1950-2003.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is reporting that last year was the hottest on record for the contiguous United States, shattering CRUSHING by a wide margin the previous record set in 1998. The average temperature of 55.3 degrees Fahrenheit was 1 degree above the previous record and 3.2 degrees higher than the average for the 20th century. That is a huge difference.
What is wrong with this picture: fires are getting larger, and budgets for fire suppression are decreasing. If the predictions are correct, the number of acres burned will continue to increase even more. The people that beg for our votes and then get sent to congress need to not just write strongly-worded letters about the shortage of fire suppression resources, they need to realize that they hold the purse strings and it is their job to actually take action by approving budgets and passing legislation, instead of what happened in December. Letters are meaningless, meant to be a smoke screen to obscure the reality that little is being accomplished.
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Below is a brief version of the paper referenced above:
More researchers have recently come to the same conclusions others have about the effect that bark beetles have on wildland fire behavior. Some people see beetle-killed trees and intuitively think that fire behavior will be greatly increased in those areas. There is not complete agreement on this, but at least two recent studies have concluded that beetle killed trees do not substantially increase the risk of active crown fire, at least in lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta) and spruce (Picea engelmannii)-fir (Abies spp.). We said the same thing as early as two years ago.
The latest research paper is titled “Do Bark Beetle Outbreaks Increase Wildfire Risks in the Central U.S. Rocky Mountains? Implications from Recent Research”. The authors were Scott H. Black, Dominik Kulakowski, Barry R. Noon, and Dominick A. DellaSala, from the Xerces Society, Clark University, Colorado State University, and Geos Institute, respectively.
Their taxpayer-funded research is available to taxpayers if we pay an additional fee to the Natural Areas Journal. (UPDATE January 24, 2013. We contacted one of the authors, Dr. Barry R. Noon, and he graciously sent us a copy of the paper.)
But their abstract can be read on the internet for free. Here is an excerpt:
…We review the literature on the efficacy of silvicutural practices to control outbreaks and on fire risk following bark beetle outbreaks in several forest types. While research is ongoing and important questions remain unresolved, to date most available evidence indicates that bark beetle outbreaks do not substantially increase the risk of active crown fire in lodgepole pine and spruce-fir forests under most conditions. Instead, active crown fires in these forest types are primarily contingent on dry conditions rather than variations in stand structure, such as those brought about by outbreaks.
Their conclusions are similar to those in another paper titled Effects of bark beetle-caused tree mortality on wildfire, and was written by Jeffrey A. Hicke, Morris C. Johnson, Jane L. Hayes, and Haiganoush K. Preisler. We wrote about it in June of 2012. They said that the potential for active crown fire would increase somewhat between one and four years after mortality, then it would decrease substantially.
Here, in part, is what we wrote last June about that study:
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…The author’s confidence in the conclusions reached about torching potential and active crown fire potential for the first ten years was low, but it is probable that active crown potential would increase for the first four years after mortality and then decrease dramatically. Torching potential would probably increase.
Surface fire properties, defined as reaction intensity, rate of spread, and flame length, would likely increase, but the confidence in the prediction for the first four years was low.
The authors pointed out that changes in fire behavior following a pine beetle outbreak…
…may only occur under some environmental conditions. For example, effects may be manifested during intermediate wind speeds (Simard et al., 2011) or in moister conditions, such as earlier in the fire season (Steele and Copple, 2009). Past controversy on this topic can be partly reconciled by this consideration of more specificity about study question, time since outbreak, and fuels or fire characteristic when describing results.
Our view of the research
It would be helpful if all of these parameters and studies could distill the conclusions into one index helpful to land managers and firefighters, which I will call Resistance To Control (RTC). Simultaneous increases in surface fire, torching, and crowning would result in more RTC. But it becomes more complicated to characterize when, for instance, crown fire potential decreases to near zero, while surface fire intensity and torching increase. Long distance spotting is a firefighter’s biggest headache and makes fires almost impossible to control, at least at the head. Crown fires are the major culprit for long distance spotting, but surface fires and individual or multiple tree torching can also create spot fires. And all of this varies, of course, with the weather. Strong winds can make ANY fire very resistant to control as long as the fuels are continuous.
If a person leaps to the possibly incorrect conclusion that all of the fire behavior parameters shown in the chart above are accurate, including the sections with low confidence, then RTC would increase somewhat one to four years after a beetle outbreak, and then would probably decrease since the crown fire potential would dramatically decline. Surface fires, including those with some torching, can be more easily controlled using tactics, sometimes with aerial support, such as direct hand line construction, hose lays, indirect line construction with burnouts, and backfiring from out ahead of the fire. When crowning is the primary method of fire spread, you usually have to wait for either the weather or the fuels to change. Air tankers and helicopters dropping fire retardant or water can be more effective when the fire is confined to the surface, as long as firefighters are on the ground to take advantage of the temporary slowing of the rate of spread, and if the wind is not too strong.
With apologies to the authors of this very good research paper, I took the liberty of adding a Resistance To Control variable to their chart:
And of course the authors of the paper included the familiar phrase, “more research is needed”, which is a mandatory section in every research paper.
The authors, who are employed by taxpayers, arranged to have the government pay a fee to have their paper published by the for-profit Elsevier corporation which is headquartered in the Netherlands. But thankfully, this time the USFS also published it on their U.S. Government web site where taxpayers can access it at no additional charge.
If you believe taxpayer-funded research should always be available to taxpayers freely over the internet, go to the White House web site and sign the petition. (Update Jan. 23, 2013: you can still read the petition at the site, but it is closed to new signers. About 60,000 people signed it.)
A report has been released by the Joint Fire Science Program that looks at the potential effects of climate change on the vegetation and fire regime in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. The entire report, Climate, Fire and Carbon:Tipping Points in Greater Yellowstone, can be found HERE. Below are some highlights provided by the Joint Fire Science Program.
