So we're standing here in the Briggs Fire which burned on the Beaver Ranger
district of the FishLake National Forest in August and September of 2016.
The Briggs fire was a lightning caused fire,
it started in mid-august so there was for that reason and because of how steep
the terrain was and how many dead trees there were a decision was made to manage
this fire for various benefits and tried to keep firefighters safe as opposed to
just going in and extremely aggressively suppress the fire before it could
actually grow in size.
Its perimeter ended up being about eighty eight
hundred acres of which about half or so actually saw fire.
Of that, roughly 4,000 to 4,500 acre area that burned a little
less than 500 acres was high severity about 1,500 to 2,000 acres was kind of what
we call moderate severity and then the rest of it was low severity.
So in this ecosystem where we've got kind of mid
elevation forest with aspen stands and and subalpine fir and spruce, that system
is a mixed severity system it has those mixes of different intensities of fire,
different severities of fire and that's kind of the natural system that they
have as opposed to say lower elevation ponderosa pine which historically the
ecosystem would have had kind of frequent low intensity fire.
This system is designed to have different mixes
which allow for different age classes to develop, Aspen is a fire dependent
species Aspen doesn't really produce from seed, it tree sprouts from roots and
it won't do that unless you actually kill the tops of the trees the trees as
they produce photosynthesis and send sugars down to the roots they send a
chemical down called oxen this chemical actually suppresses the roots from
sprouting so if you kill the tops of the trees that chemical doesn't go to the
roots and it allows the trees to then start sprouting
which is how it kind of regenerates an aspen stand one of the things that the
forest desires out of its managed fires is to get these different age classes
and structures because right now most of this forest up at this elevation and in
this particular ecosystem has had virtually no disturbance in 100 or 100
plus years.
This is allowed the forest to grow in a state that's really really
uniform so by having fires move across the landscape and break up the
continuity and change the age structure so you have these patches like in Briggs
where we'll have young forests right adjacent to unburned patches that'll
still be older it allows those different species to kind of find their niche and
the little piece of habitat that they need to grow and thrive.
When you have a fire like this that comes through and
removes a lot of the the litter and the Duff and kind of crowns out a small
piece the forest and we get this this nice big pocket of burned out area you
get a lot of sunlight right to the ground there's a lot of species that
they won't really grow in the shade and other species that really it needs that
mineral soil for it to actually be able to come up.
So just right here we've got quite a few different things we've got
some aspen sprouts coming up here and there we've got some loopin coming up
we've got a couple of other things right just right in this little pocket so
we've got a lot of diversity before this fire burned I've walked through some of
these areas and and a lot of adjacent ecosystems that are exactly the same as
this, there was very little of this type of plant in the ground cover.
One of the reasons that lupine is is so desirable
to come in and one of the reasons it does come in first as lupine is a
nitrogen fixer it actually takes nitrogen out of the
atmosphere and puts it into the soil so that other plants will benefit from that
nitrogen.
If some of these plants like this don't come in here to make the site
a little less harsh and the conditions better for other plants some of those
things would have a really hard time establishing.
So the fact that we have so much Lupin here is actually a really
good sign so here on the beaver district of the Fishlake National Forest,
there's a pretty heavy emphasis on being able to introduce fire back in the
landscape and some of the benefits that we are realizing from both applying
prescribed fires and managing some of these fires that historically maybe 30
years ago would have been more aggressively put out where we're getting
some newer younger forests on the landscape that has kind of grown up in
is fairly uniform in age class and structure, so by getting some of these
younger patches of forest clearing out some of the older dead material we're
kind of creating this patchwork of different types of habitat and different
attributes that are useful for different types of Wildlife further it breaks up
the potential for other larger, more destructive fires to move through you
know one of the things about the decision-making that goes into a
decision about managing a fire like the Briggs fire is you know what kind of
conditions is it going to burn under, what is it going to burn like.
Subsequently you know we can do some of these things
under our own terms and this is a good example of picking a time when a fire is
is much more manageable than had it been at a different time of year so there's a
desire to have these kind of fires on the landscape to meet those objectives
of having different types of forest.