(dramatic music)
- The Chiricahuas has a fire history,
pretty similar to most of Southern Arizona.
That is with a period of repression of fires
from the early 1900s,
all the way up until at least the 80s.
We had a period of dryness and drought
and that drought resulted in the Horseshoe 2 fire in 2011,
which burned almost the entire mountain range,
about 200,000 acres.
There's not been a similar fire since.
In some parts of this mountain range,
nine years would be a reasonable time
for it to come back and burn again.
I'm Jim Malusa.
I'm a research scientist
with the School of Natural Resources and the Environment
in the University of Arizona.
I'm here with my wife,
Geologists, Sonia Norman of the Desert Museum
and together, we're gonna look at
the recovery from the Horseshoe 2 fire
we're very close and now comes the fun part
where we take a look at the picture.
There's that tree and this one.
I consider myself a plant ecologist
and vegetation mapping is one of my specialties.
And that is why things live here and not over there
and as part of that work,
I also do repeat photography
to see how vegetation changes through time.
- I can see that Ridge, this one, this is the closer one.
- Repeat photography is a great way
to keep your finger on the pulse of ecosystem changes,
mainly because it's so understandable and easy to see.
With pictures everyone can just look at it and say,
"Oh, the pines are all being replaced by oaks."
And so it's a visual and informative way
of seeing what's going on in our world.
It's more than just taking a picture.
We're gonna try to get an idea
of the relative ground cover
of the different species out here.
Here's last year's.
You can see Sonia with the...
I have written here struggling Q-U-E-M
that's quercus MEI,
and it looks like that one has died as well.
There's that little one right there
next to the turpentine Bush.
- [Sonia] I see it.
- The main driver of ecosystem change
is gonna be disturbance when something happens,
it can be a drought, it could be a fire,
it could be grazing, it could be many things.
And that sets in motion, a series of changes in the species,
and that sometimes returns the ecosystem
to what it was before and sometimes it doesn't.
(feet stomping)
As a young man, I was lucky enough
to have parents who let me wander
and that was a big part of exploring the world.
I was actually released into it
and so when I got my first backpack as a 16 year old,
I said, I wanna go overnight in the mountains.
They said, "have a good time."
(Jim chuckling)
As mom drove me up Sabino Canyon
back when you can drive up Sabino Canyon,
scraped the side of the station wagon
on the bridges, the skinny bridges
and just let me lose.
(car engine revving)
(paper shuffling)
(low tone music)
(leaves crackling)
There're some hikes that I've done
that since I lived here so long,
there's a particular one in the ring cones.
I've been hiking every year since '74,
and it's like 45, 46 years of making the same hike.
And I remember when changes happened early on
in those trips in my life when I was in year 10 or 20,
and there'd be a landslide or fire
and things would fall down and I'd be distraught
actually I'd be going,
"Oh God, I've lost my favorite place,"
but I didn't lose it at this turned into something else.
And I think every loss
is an opportunity for another species.
Of course, we hate to see change
that we can blame on ourselves
and say that we made it harder.
(brooding music)
From the repeat photography
that we've done in the Chiricahua so far,
it's apparent that ecosystems,
that the lower level of,
for example, the Pinal ecosystem,
they're susceptible to losing particular species
that need cooler conditions.
Cooler conditions or wetter conditions.
And so our primary concern with a Bighorn fire
would be losing forested areas
and having them turn into the scrub land,
just because it's now a bit warmer and dryer.
And if that does occur,
the things at the very tippy top
are gonna be pushed off into oblivion,
and that would include the cork bark fir,
which is a species that
is in the Catalinas and the Pinalenos
and that's the only two places that it's found
in the Coronado, the National Forest.
All right, so where are we gonna go next?
(cool piano music)
We're gonna go up the mountain
a little bit higher up the road
toward Barfoot Park and visit pine ecosystems.
You ready? - [Sonia] Yeah.
- Well, when I first got here,
I was pretty disappointed to see the Chihuahuan Pines
who were my kind of hero of this ecosystem
that had come back so strongly,
now they're all brown.
And at first I thought maybe they're dead,
or they're almost dead,
but it ends up after we've measured 10 of these trees
that they actually did grow.
They've managed to grow 20 centimeters
over the last two years.
And it's clear to anyone
that gets up close to one of these trees
they're stressed out
and so everything's gonna rely on
probably the next year of rain.
So if we get a late season hurricane that would help.
October rain in here but one more dry summer
and so that could be the end of this pine forest.
(brooding music)
Humans like trees, and especially in a hot place,
they wanna sit under a tree
and they don't wanna sit under a Bush.
And so we have a natural tendency
to lament the loss of a forest,
whether or not you would call that a natural change,
the forest burns and it comes back as oaks scrub
depends on your definition of natural.
Humans are part of nature
and we've always changed the world around us.
And so people need to decide
what we want our world to look like
and act to help that happen.