Yellowstone Second Burn Study

[BigHornRam]

Interesting study but not really "unprecedented". Right conditions with an abundance of dry fuel on the ground will lead to extremely hot fires.

Curious to see how long it take for grasses to establish on these sites.

Resilience of Yellowstone's forests tested by unprecedented fire

In August 2016, areas of Yellowstone National Park that burned in 1988 burned again. Shortly after, in October 2016, ecologist Monica Turner and her team of graduate students visited the park to begin to assess the landscape.

phys.org

 

[sapperJ24]

Thanks for posting this. Recent work from the South Fork Flathead in the Bob Marshall Wilderness discusses which sites may transition from forest to grass/herb/forb or from dense forest to a more park-like forest in reburn scenarios.

Here is a presentation from this winter at the Fire Sciences Lab in Missoula by Andrew Larson of the University of Montana. The presentation is about an hour long, discussion on reburns beings around 20 minutes in. https://videos.firelab.org/ffs/2018-19Seminar/022819seminar/022819seminar.mp4

Summary: "Lessons from Wilderness Fire: fuels and forest structure in unburned, once-burned, and twice-burned forests in the Bob Marshall Wilderness” Since the early 1980s managers have allowed many lightningignited fires to burn with minimal interference in forests of the Bob Marshall Wilderness in northwestern Montana, USA. We used this active fire regime to investigate fire-effects and post-fire fuel loads, tree regeneration, and forest structure in mixed-conifer forest communities. Our most important finding was that surface fuel loads are maintained or increased in the years following an initial wildfire after a long fire-free period as fire killed trees and branches fall to the ground. This unsurprising result nevertheless deserves highlighting because the current conventional wisdom is that an initial fire can be thought of as a “fuel treatment.” Our most surprising finding was the unimportance of reburns as a cause of transitions to non-forest. Managers need to plan for multiple fire entries (i.e., two or more fires) if their goal is to use wildfires as surface fuel reduction treatments. Some transitions to a putative non-forest condition should be expected following both initial fires and short-interval reburns. Thus, managers may wish to incorporate this outcome into their expectations, and into their outreach and education efforts, in order to prepare policy makers and the public for forest conversion. "

 

[WyoDoug]

Truth be said, wildfires are a natural part of nature. When Man messes with that, fuel build up over the year and becomes even more dangerous. Many pine cones serve as an example of that. Some need the heat of forest fires to pop their seeds loose to regenerate the forest with new-growth trees.