Larry Caldwell wrote in message t...
(caerbannog) writes:
It should be pointed out that fire-suppression policies did not
play a major role in the Yellowstone fires. Most of the forest
that burned there was high-elevation lodgepole pine or mixed
lodgepole-pine/subalpine-fire forest. Infrequent, high-intensity
crown fires are the norm there.
You are mistaken. Yellowstone is the result of decades of fire
suppression. The big Yellowstone fire was an exception. The park
management was concerned about fuel loads, so decided to let it burn. It
got away from them, and the result made national headlines.
With regard to the type of forest that dominates Yellowstone National
Park, *you* are mistaken. Although fire-suppression policies have
caused drastic changes in many of the forests in the West, such
policies have had little impact on most of the Yellowstone forests.
On the Yellowstone National Park web-site, you will find
an interesting article at:
http://www.nps.gov/yell/publications...references.htm
(beware of possible URL wrap).
Here are some excerpts:
################################################## #
"By the 1980s, about a third of Yellowstone's forests were more than
250 years old and reaching their most flammable stage. While it was
only a question of time before they would burn, it could have been a
matter of weeks or years. It was a question of when a summer with the
right conditions would arrive."
"The legacy of fire suppression.
In the heat of the moment, park managers on the defensive were apt to
attribute the magnitude of the 1988 fires at least in part to the
suppression policies of their predecessors. But in the more careful
post-fire assessment, it was recognized that effective suppression had
been possible for only about 30 years. In forests where trees live to
be hundreds of years old, this had not been long enough to add
significantly to the fuel accumulation, and during extreme burning
conditions such as those of 1988, crown fires burned irrespective of
fuel loads. "
......
"Although fire suppression may have had some influence on the spread
and severity of fires in 1988, Romme and Despain concluded that the
large scale of the fires was primarily due to the coincidence of an
extremely dry and windy summer with fuel that had accumulated for
hundreds of years through natural plant succession. Although
Yellowstone had become highly vulnerable to large fires because of the
age of its forests, that vulnerability was part of the area's ecology,
not a result of human intervention."
......
"In Yellowstone and the Biology of Time (1998), Mary Meagher and Doug
Houston compared photographs taken since the 19th century to document
changes in the landscape. The vast tracks of lodgepole pine-dominated
forests that characterize the central and southern parts of the park,
most of which lie between 2,300 m and 2,600 m, had changed little in
appearance or extent during the century before the 1988 fires."
###########################################
The high-elevation lodgepole forests in Yellowstone N.P. have mean
fire-return intervals measured in *centuries*. These forests have a
very different fire regime than do the lower elevation ponderosa pine
and douglas fir forests.
Effective fire-suppression was in effect in Yellowstone for only a few
decades prior to the "let it burn" policy initiated in 1972. These
few decades of fire-suppression had virtually no effect on the vast
majority of Yellowstone's forests.
Lodgepole pines have evolved a "burn hotter than hell and
incinerate the competition, then grow back real fast"
wildfire strategy.
Just about the whole West enjoys a fire climax ecology of some sort.
In Yellowstone, the lodgepoles are growing back like crazy
in the burned-over areas, and are doing so without the assistance
of timber-industry "stewardship".
Time to burn them again, before they build up another huge fuel load.
Lodgepole will sprout thick as the hair on a dog. Most of them need to
be killed off.
Under normal climactic circumstances, it takes 200-300 years for a
high-elevation lodgepole pine forest in Yellowstone to become
vulnerable to fire. Attempting to conduct prescribed-burn/mechanical
thinning projects in such forests would do nothing except waste
taxpayers' money.