Yellowstone Ecosystem is a fire-adapted
ecosystem.
You start to pull on one
thread of nature's web and you affect
the integrity of the entire entire web.
Resilient landscapes mean that the
landscape itself can absorb a
disturbance like a fire and still
continue to function as it had before.
Fire's role in the ecosystem is complex,
it can create healthy landscapes and
build a better environment for native
plants and animals.
It can also have
negative effects making soil hydrophobic
or allowing invasive species to take hold.
The first thing to understand about
disturbance ecology or fire ecology is
that fire is is a natural and necessary
component of these systems and these
forests in this area have evolved with
wildfire for really their whole
existence, well before humans were here,
fires were burning in this landscape.
And so the landscape is resilient to fire
but humans can affect that by by
eliminating fire.
And we've done that
over a lot of the dry forests of the
West in in the 1900s we we fought fire
in many places that historically had
frequent fires and the resilience of
those systems declined because of human
intervention.
How can we manage fire in a
way that benefits our forests and grasslands?
The answer is building
resilient landscapes.
A resilient
landscape allows fire to play its
natural role, healthy forests benefit
from fires to clear overgrowth increase
forest health and improve forage for
wildlife.
But how do we create resilient
landscapes?
In ecology when we speak
about resilience, we're talking about the
ability of a landscape or an ecosystem
to absorb a disturbance to experience a
wildfire and then come back to the the
ecosystem stage and function where it
was before.
For instance, a forest shows resilience
to wildfire if it burns and then
regenerates again as a forest.
Might be
slightly different species there's there
certainly different sequences of species
after wildfire, but if it regenerates as
a forest and then that's showing some
ecological resilience.
Your end product
should be a mosaic look in the national forests.
If everything's old and
everything is dead everything burns but
if you have different levels of growth
at different times you get this mosaic
pattern in there and that's what a
healthy forest is.
Mosaic patterns create
natural firebreaks increase plant
diversity and provide better habitat for
wildlife, there are several ways to
encourage these mosaic landscapes.
One is
using prescribed fire to reduce fuels
prescribed burns are planned in advance
to improve forest health, reduce
hazardous fuels and enhance plant growth
and regeneration and they are secured by
trained fire personnel.
We have
suppression crews that are you know
trained to fight fires and keep
community safe and and keep fires from
coming off the federal lands onto
private lands but we also have crews
that go out and collect science fire
effects data, historical data on fires as
well as the effects of fires one year
post fire five year, post fire and ten
year post fire and these fire effects
analysis and these fire behavior
analysis really help us
to make sure that we're making the right
decisions.
Another option to decrease fuels is to
reduce tree stand density by logging or
thinning.
Thinning increases the health
of the remaining trees making them less
vulnerable to insect damage and disease
native insects play a role in our
ecosystem but populations may reach
unhealthy levels and single species and
aged timber stands.
Wildfire can easily
damage dense uniform stands.
Fuel reduction works most effectively when
everyone is involved.
Where we're standing here today is just one example
of the fuel projects that we did we as
you can see greatly reduce the amount of
trees we have here.
This married up with
some BLM work, some state work, and some
Firewise work across the river here
behind me by the ranch which enabled us
to successfully suppress the spots that
came into this area as it was coming
down off the mountain.
We were able to
put firefighters here safely, and the
results were as we hoped, we had no
losses of structures.
In the fire adapted
ecosystem we have in the western United
States, resilient landscapes thrive after
low intensity fire.
Some plants and
animals depend on fire for survival.
Aspen re-sprouts after severe fires,
lodgepole pine has serotinous cones that
can drop seeds after a severe fire, so we
have species that are well adapted to
severe fires, the re-sprouters and the
Cedars and then we have species like
Doug Fir that has thick bark and small
light seeds that can disperse to areas
after a fire that's that's well adapted
for lower severity or more frequent
fires.
Fire releases nutrients in the
soil needed for plant growth and animal
nutrition these minerals are key for
many functions.
Fire weed, a native food
source for moose elk and mule deer may
have protein levels four to six percent
higher for the first two years after a fire.
Fire can improve food sources for
wildlife.
It can also create new habitat
you look at a burnt forest and you take
many of the cavity nesting birds that we
have fly over that and they look at that
and they go which million-dollar home am
I going to live in this summer? This is
so great.
Resilient landscapes are one component
of the cohesive strategy, but to be
effective we need all three.
Resilient landscapes help lower the risk to our
fire adapted communities and allow safe
and effective wildfire response, managing
fires effectively with firefighter
safety is the first priority to take place.