biodiversity forests
Beyond biodiversity: A new way of looking at how species interconnect.
In a development that has important implications for conservation, scientists are increasingly focusing not just on what species are present in an ecosystem, but on the roles that certain key species play in shaping their environment.
In 1966, an ecologist at the University of Washington named Robert Paine removed all the ochre starfish from a short stretch of Pacific shoreline on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. The absence of the predator had a dramatic effect on its ecosystem. In less than a year, a diverse tidal environment collapsed into a monoculture of mussels because the starfish was no longer around to eat them.
By keeping mussel numbers down, the starfish had allowed many other species to thrive, from seaweed to sponges. Paine’s research led to the well-known concept of keystone species: The idea that some species in an ecosystem have prevailing traits — in this case preying on mussels — whose importance is far greater than the dominant traits of other species in that ecosystem.
Now, a half-century later, researchers are taking the study of traits much farther, with some scientists concluding that understanding the function of species can tell us more about ecosystems than knowing which species are present — a concept known as functional diversity. This idea is not merely academic, as scientists say that understanding functional diversity can play an important role in shaping conservation programs to enhance biodiversity and preserve or restore ecosystems.
“The trait perspective is very powerful,” says Jonathan Lefcheck, a researcher at the Bigelow Marine Lab in East Boothbay, Maine who studies functional diversity in marine environments. “Some species in an ecosystem are redundant, and some species are very powerful.”
Much about the concept is also unknown. One case study is taking place along the Mekong River, a 2,700-mile waterway that serves as a vital fishery for millions of people in Southeast Asia. While the fishery is healthy now, widespread changes in the ecosystem — including the proposed construction of numerous dams and the development of riparian forests and wetlands — could mean that key fish species might not be around to carry out important functions, such as keeping prey numbers in check or recycling nutrients.
“There is simply no understanding of how the construction of a dam today, and another five years from now, and another in 10 years — all in the same river basin — will impact the biodiversity and push it past a point of no return, where large scale species extinctions are imminent,” said Leo Saenz, director of eco-hydrology for Conservation International.
So a team of ecologists from Conservation International is trying to determine which roles various species in the Mekong fill that are critical to perpetuating a healthy ecosystem. Those species might be predators like the giant snakehead, which helps control other fish populations so they don’t become too numerous, or thick groves of mangrove forests in shallow areas that provide a nursery for a wide variety of fish species. Models can then predict the best way to protect these key species and ensure a healthy river over the long term.
“Ecosystem resilience is an important part of what we aim to maintain, both for the interest of biodiversity conservation and for the maintenance of the ecosystem services that nature provides,” says Trond Larsen, a biologist who heads Conservation International’s Rapid Assessment Program for biodiversity.
Some scientists now compare knowing which species are present in an ecosystem to knowing only which parts of a car are present. Functional trait ecology is a deeper dive into ecosystem dynamics to help understand how the parts come together to create a natural environment that runs smoothly, like a well-tuned automobile, thus enabling a more focused protection of the vital parts that keep it going.
“Say you have two habitats with 10 different species in each,” explains Marc Cadotte, a professor of Urban Forest Conservation and Biology at the University of Toronto. “Yet, they might not be comparable at all if in one of those habitats eight of those 10 species are similar and redundant, while in the other habitat, all 10 species are unique from one other. We need alternative measures for biodiversity that tell us something about the niche differences, trait differences, how species are interacting, and how they are using resources. Functional diversity and phylogenetic diversity are meant to capture that.”
Phylogenetic diversity refers to species that have few or no close relatives and that are very different from other species, which may mean that they can contribute in very different ways to an ecosystem. Protecting phylogenetic diversity, then, is part of protecting important functions. The distinctive pearl bubble coral is one example, as it provides shelter to shrimp, an important food for the highly endangered hawksbill turtle.
Better understanding these aspects of ecosystems is a game-changer for the conservation of biodiversity. The Indo-West Pacific region, between the east coast of Africa and South Asia, has the highest diversity of life in the world’s oceans. But many species there, such as damselfishes and butterfly fishes, have a lot of overlap with other species in terms of traits — somewhat similar body sizes, similar habitats and habits, how and where they school, etc. That means they may have a narrower range of traits that may be important for ecosystem function.
“In the Galapagos, on the other hand, there are fewer species, but each of those species is doing something much different than the others,” says Lefcheck, who worked on research looking at functional diversity there. “If you were prioritizing your conservation efforts, you might focus on the Galapagos. Even though it doesn’t have as much biodiversity in the traditional sense, it has a much greater diversity of form and function.”
“Functional diversity is incredibly difficult to determine,” says Larsen of Conservation International, “but generating an improved understanding of the relationship between species and their functional diversity is key to understanding and mitigating impacts or threats from development.” His organization works to protect tuna and sharks, for example, because these predators help maintain a healthy and balanced ecosystem by keeping numbers of prey from growing too large and by culling the sick and the weak.
In a recent study in the journal Nature, researchers say that focusing on species function and evolutionary heritage can narrow the focus on what needs to be protected most urgently. “Biodiversity conservation has mostly focused on species, but some species may offer much more critical or unique functions or evolutionary heritage than others — something current conservation planning does not readily address,” says Walter Jetz, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale University.
The researchers noted that 26 percent of the world’s bird and mammal species are not included in protected reserves. Focusing on the most important traits and evolutionary heritage of those species would allow conservationists to narrow their protection of critical biodiversity with just a 5 percent increase in protected areas, and would be far less costly than trying to protect them all, the Nature study shows.
As traits are better understood in ecosystems, Lefcheck says, it allows tweaking and management of ecosystems for certain outcomes. “You could choose to conserve the species that are very different than others that might lead to changes in the ecosystem that could be considered beneficial,” he says. That has potential for fisheries management, for example. “When I tell someone, ‘This species has been around for 2.6 million years,’ that’s very esoteric in a way,” says Lefcheck. “But if I can say, ‘This large-bodied species produces a lot of biomass, and it can crop down invasive algae, and it plays a high-functioning and critical role in the ecosystem,’ you might want to protect species that have that trait.”
Such is the case with parrotfish and surgeonfish — “reef-grazers” that eat algae and keep coral reefs healthy. Because of these key traits, the government of Belize has enacted a law to protect these two species.
Understanding traits also can enhance ecosystem restoration projects. While building a new oyster aquaculture fishery can provide a commercial harvest, “we also know that oysters provide a lot of other services,” says Lefcheck. “They filter the water. They provide nooks and crannies for small fish and invertebrates to live in, and they are fish food for the tasty things we like to catch and to put on the dinner table. Where is the optimum placement of this restoration to enhance the variety of services we get from the oysters beyond just having the reefs there?”
The benefits of understanding functional diversity can go well beyond ecosystem restoration. In Toronto, for example, green (plant-covered) roofs are required on most new commercial buildings to help cool the city and reduce storm water runoff. A monoculture of grass called sedum is used. In studies, though, Cadotte and colleagues have found that if grass species that are distantly related and dissimilar are used in the mix, they have different traits that provide more shade for the soil and help the roof keep the building cooler. This mix also reduces stormwater runoff by about 20 percent.
The formal study of functional traits can be traced back to the 1990s, when ecologist David Tilman at the University of Minnesota did research on grasslands. He found that those regions with more species diversity did better during a drought, and only a few of the grasses resistant to drought were needed. Later, he and his colleagues discovered that the presence of some grasses with certain traits, such as an ability to fix nitrogen, was more important than overall species diversity.
Researchers in Jena, Germany established the Jena Experiment to follow up on this work. They found that there are plants, such as wild tobacco, that emit “messenger molecules” when they are under assault by herbivores to attract predators from miles away that eat their enemies. This trait not only benefits the tobacco, but other species in the neighboring plant community.
Experts say these findings could also help agriculture rely less on pesticides by understanding the right mix of plants to maximize predator defenses. “Varying the expression of just a few genes in a few individuals can have large protective effects for the whole field,” says Meredith Schuman, a researcher on the Jena Experiment at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology. “It’s an economically tenable way to recover the lost benefits of biodiversity for the vast expanses of land that have already been converted from natural, biodiverse habitats into agricultural monocultures.”
These new approaches to ecology show how limited the science has been. Many researchers welcome the change. “Ecology has moved from counting species to accounting for species,” says Cadotte.
Jim Robbins is a veteran journalist based in Helena, Montana. He has written for the New York Times, Conde Nast Traveler, and numerous other publications. His latest book, The Wonder of Birds: What they Tell Us about the World, Ourselves and a Better Future, is due out in May.
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Wildfires: How they form, and why they're so dangerous.
Everything you need to know about wildfires.
As deadly wildfires continue to rage across Northern California’s wine country, with winds picking up speed overnight and worsening conditions to now include a combined 54,000 acres of torched land, it now seems more important than ever to understand how wildfires work, and their lasting implications on our health and the environment.
HOW A WILDFIRE STARTS
Though the exact source of Sonoma County’s wildfires is unclear, authorities have pointed to the fact that 95 percent of fires in the state of California are started by people, according to CNN.
Meteorologists aren’t yet able to forecast wildfire outbreaks, but there are three conditions that must be present in order for a wildfire to burn. Firefighters refer to it as the fire triangle: fuel, oxygen, and a heat source. Four out of five wildfires are started by people, but dry weather, drought, and strong winds can create a recipe for the perfect disaster—which can transform a spark into a weeks- or months-long blaze that consumes tens of thousands of acres.
Another possible cause of forest fires is lightning. Scientists have found that every degree of global warming sets off a 12 percent bump in lightning activity. Since 1975 the number of fires ignited by lightning has increased between two and five percent.
A TRICKY RELATIONSHIP
Historically, wildfires are actually supposed to be beneficial to certain natural landscapes, clearing underbrush in forests and triggering the release of seeds in some plant species, such as the Jack pine.
Unfortunately, the suppression of naturally occurring, low-intensity forest fires has actually aided in the ability for high-intensity wildfires to run rampant. (Watch a time-lapse of the beauty and danger of wildfires.)
In the first half of the 20th century, the U.S. Forest Service suffered from what historian Stephen Pyne calls “pyrophobia,” or the desire to suppress all wildfires (even the good ones). Since the science of forestry first took root in temperate Europe, which is home to a vastly different forest ecosystem than those found in the United States, fire was seen by early U.S. foresters as a problem caused by people.
In some places, the path toward a safer, more ecologically sound relationship with fire is being blazed with prescribed fire, and what’s being called by officials as “managed wildfire.” Fire crews put their efforts to suppress wildfires around the most fire-prone areas, such as communities, municipal watersheds, and sequoia groves. Otherwise they are learning to let some fires burn themselves out, as nature intended.
WILDFIRES CAN HAVE LONG-LASTING IMPLICATIONS FOR OUR PLANET
Forest fires actually have the ability to heat up the entire planet, a NASA study from 2016 revealed. In ecosystems such as boreal forests, which store more carbon than any other terrestrial ecosystem on the planet, the effects of climate change are playing out twice as fast.
Fires ravaged the boreal forests of Canada’s vast north woods in May 2016 and continued for months, consuming millions of acres of trees, and scorching the rich organic soil on the forest floor, which serves as a large reservoir for carbon. For every degree that our planet warms, the forest needs a 15 percent increase in precipitation to compensate for increased dryness. (See how megafires are remaking American forests.)
Similar to the case in Northern California, investigators believe that Canada’s boreal forest fire was caused by humans.
Barack Obama visited Alaska in 2015 to highlight the dangers of climate change, calling up images of the hundreds of wildfires that burned across the state just that summer. At the time, 2014 had been the warmest year on record, a milestone that has now been surpassed by 2016.
THE EFFECTS OF FIRE ON PEOPLE
Worldwide, wildfire smoke kills 339,000 people a year, mostly in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, according to estimates. Tenfold increases in asthma attacks, emergency room visits, and hospital admissions have also been reported when smoke blankets the places where people live.
Common in places such as the western United States, layers of stagnant air called inversions can be created by fires and are responsible for holding smoke down where people breathe. Airborne, microscopic particles that slip past the body’s defenses and into the farthest reaches of the respiratory system can begin to coagulate the blood, forming a thick goo. Smoke also contains carbon monoxide, causing long-lasting damage to the heart. (Learn wildfire safety tips.)
Emergency room visits for heart failure jumped 37 percent, and saw a 66 percent increase for breathing problem-related visits following the smokiest days of a big 2008 peat fire in eastern North Carolina, EPA researchers found.
HOW FIRE IMPACTS WILDLIFE
Wildlife tend to have a very different relationship with fire. Some have evolved to live with it, and some even thrive after fires. That’s not to say all wild animals call fire a friend—there are some who can’t outrun the quickly moving flames, and young or small animals are particularly at risk.
Slow-moving animals such as koalas, whose natural instinct is to crawl up further into a tree, may end up trapped.
For many environments, fire doesn’t actually have to mean death, but instead change, re-birth, or new opportunities. For example, woodpeckers will fly in to feast on bark beetles in dead and dying trees, and leave when the beetles are gone.
A year-old forest will have a different set of flora and fauna inhabiting it than a forest that is 40 years old, and according to wildlife biologist Patricia Kennedy, “a lot of species require that reset,” which comes from a fire.
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Record Amazon fires stun scientists; sign of sick, degraded forests.
Scientists warn of a dangerous synergy: forest degradation has turned the Amazon from carbon sink to carbon source; while globally, humanity’s carbon emissions are worsening drought and fires.
With the fire season still on-going, Brazil has seen 208,278 fires this year, putting 2017 on track to beat 2004’s record 270,295 fires. While drought (likely exacerbated by climate change) worsens the fires, experts say that nearly every blaze this year is human-caused.
The highest concentration of fires in the Amazon biome in September was in the São Félix do Xingu and Altamira regions. Fires in Pará state in September numbered 24,949, an astonishing six-fold increase compared with 3,944 recorded in the same month last year.
The Amazon areas seeing the most wildfires have also seen rapid change and development in recent years, with high levels of deforestation, and especially forest degradation, as loggers, cattle ranchers, agribusiness and dam builders move in.
Scientists warn of a dangerous synergy: forest degradation has turned the Amazon from carbon sink to carbon source; while globally, humanity’s carbon emissions are worsening drought and fires. Brazil’s rapid Amazon development deepens the problem. Researchers warn that mega-fires could be coming, unless trends are reversed.
Figures from the Brazilian government’s INPE (National Institute of Space Research) show that 2017 is shaping up to be the worst year on record for forest fires: 208,278 were detected by 5 October. Alberto Setzer, who runs INPE’s fire monitoring department, told Mongabay that 2017 was now on course to overtake 2004, until now the year with the most fires, when 270,295 were detected. More fires were seen in September of this year (110,736) than in any previous month in the 20 years that INPE has been recording fires.
Two rural districts in Pará state had the highest number of fires in the Amazon biome: 9,786 in São Félix do Xingu and 6,153 in Altamira up to the end of last month. The increase of fires in the whole of Pará has been astonishing: INPE figures show that there were 24,949 just in September, a six-fold increase compared with 3,944 recorded in the same month last year. In fact, 29,316 fires were recorded in all of last year for the Amazonian state.
While there is a high level of drought this year, it is clear that something other than dry conditions is driving the record number of wildfires. Setzer told Mongabay that the fires almost everywhere have a common characteristic: they are manmade.
Disturbed Amazon areas see worst burns
INPE, which has a sophisticated system for monitoring fires, has built up an impressive archive of satellite images of the damage done by the fires. This archive shows that the wildfires have increasingly been spreading into protected forests. Over fifty conserved areas have been impacted this year, almost twice the number damaged last year. And the list includes some of Brazil’s iconic nature parks.
Araguaia National Park is a highly important protected area on the island of Bananal in southwest Tocantins state. Covering 558,000 hectares (1.4 million acres), it is home to threatened species like the giant otter and jaguar, and stands out as an oasis in the midst of the parched savanna vegetation of the Cerrado that surrounds it. Earlier this month one of Brazil’s leading TV shows, the Fantástico programme on Globo TV, showed powerful images of the national park being devoured in flames. In all, 70 percent of it was destroyed.
Out-of-control fires have affected cattle ranches as well. In the region of Carmolândia in the north of Tocantins a fierce fire raced across eight farms, killing over a thousand cattle. Almost everywhere, fire brigades have been too poorly staffed and equipped to control the blazes.
2017 dry, but not a record drought
Setzer explained that when much of the vegetation is dry — the result of a prolonged drought, as happened this year — wildfires can rapidly race out of control. “In some areas of the center-west of Brazil, there hasn’t been a drop of rain for four months.”
Even so, the 2017 drought may not turn out to be exceptional. “It does not look as if the drought this year will be as severe as in 2005, 2007, 2010, and 2015/2016,” Luiz Aragão, Senior Lecturer in Earth Systems Science at Exeter University, UK, told Mongabay.
However, he added, his analysis was based on past oceanic conditions which could still change, with the 2017 drought getting worse: “This happened in 2015 when the drought intensified from October till December, but this is not usual in the Amazon.”
What seems to be occurring, he said, is that the Amazonian climate is changing — what was once regarded as an exceptional drought there, is now becoming more accepted as normal. “The dry seasons in Brazil seem to be becoming drier and more frequent,” explained Aragão, just as forecast by climate modelling, and as observed by scientists.
The Big Green Lie
The fact that there has been a record number of fires this year doesn’t necessarily mean that there has been an increase in the area deforested. Instead, fires are often the result of a different phenomenon: forest degradation, which occurs when loggers move in to extract hard timber.
Loggers only fell valuable trees they’re harvesting and those in the way. But what they leave behind under the forest canopy are heaps of dead limbs and debris — dry, flammable slash. However, that degraded understory left by loggers rarely appears in official deforestation figures, which only report on clear cuts, defined as deforested areas over 62,000 square meters (15 acres).
Antonio Donato Nobre, a visiting researcher at INPE, calls this hidden damage the Big Green Lie: “This wholesale forest degradation is not monitored and it affects massive areas, many times larger than those clear-felled in deforestation. Such degraded forests are very vulnerable to drought and fires. Indeed, it is the main reason why the fires spread so easily”.
For many decades scientists assumed major fires were unlikely in wet places like the Amazon, so scientific knowledge regarding tropical wildfire dynamics is still lacking. Ted Feldpausch, an expert in tropical ecology at Exeter University, UK, told Mongabay: “Understanding of how tropical forests change due to fire is still quite limited. This is partly due to fire being variable, burning downed trees in deforested areas and also entering standing forests, where fire movement and impact may be more cryptic, e.g. ranging from slow-moving fires that creep across the forest floor consuming litter, to high energy fires that arch through canopies and consume whole trees. This variation in fire can result in a large range of impacts on tree mortality, carbon storage in living and dead trees, and forest structure and composition.”
Lack of political will
Both Setzer and Nobre believe that, at heart, the failure to bring forest degradation and deforestation under control in Brazil is a lack of political will by federal and state governments. Setzer said: “It requires extreme political tolerance (to use a politically correct term) to allow 700,000 square kilometers [270,271 square miles] to be illegally cleared — and to know where this is happening in real time — without doing anything.”
Nobre is more outspoken: “The very agents of wanton destruction of the Amazon are now controlling the legislative and executive branches of the federal government and working day and night to increase deforestation and degradation via bills and acts that are being tolerated by the judiciary.”
Nobre believes that time is fast running out for saving the Amazon rainforest: “I was alarmed about the future of the Amazon years ago, in 2009, when there was still a good chance that we could stave off final destruction. In 2014, I published an accessible review of the scientific literature that showed that the unabated process of destruction in the Amazon was leading to disaster.
“Now I hear from colleagues studying forest degradation, on the front line and remotely, that multiple organ failure is underway in [the forests of] eastern Amazonia — that the forest is already collapsing in areas not directly affected by chain saws and bulldozers… Unless a very different government comes to power in 2019, it will be too late for huge areas of the Amazon,” he said, referring to next year’s Brazilian election.
This is how the world ends…
This year’s record wildfires are not only having Amazonian impacts. It is becoming increasingly clear to researchers that the fate of the Amazon’s forests is inextricably bound to the fate of the world — and vice versa.
While in the past Amazonian forests served humankind inadvertently by absorbing more carbon than emitted, delaying the worst impacts of global warming, Feldpausch says that has now changed. The Amazon has now become part of the problem: “The combined effect of continued droughts, fire, and forest degradation is reducing carbon stocks, resulting in Amazon forests being an estimated net source of carbon during the past decade.”
Indeed, a new, just published study by researchers at the Woods Hole Research Center and Boston University, has found that human-caused deforestation, forest degradation and disturbance of tropical forests in Africa, the Americas and Asia have resulted in those forests now emitting more carbon into the atmosphere than they sequester on an annual basis.
More alarming still, some scientists believe that the speed at which Amazonian forests are being devoured by wildfire, plus the greenhouse gas emissions from those fires, will only aggravate global warming.
In truth, the very survival of the Amazon may depend on humanity’s rapid success in radically reducing its release of greenhouse gases planet-wide. Bruno Lopes, a Ph.D student at the Federal University of Viçosa, spells this out: A recently published scientific study, to which he contributed, created a model demonstrating how the collapse of the Amazon forest might occur. If the world continues on its present track, he told Mongabay: “More severe droughts are going to make the soil drier and make the trees lose their leaves and branches. This combustible material… will accumulate in the soil and make the forest more vulnerable to high intensity fires.”
Change, he says, will not be slow, gradual or continuous. Instead, “If we follow present trends and we move toward a 4 degrees Celsius [7.2 degrees Fahrenheit] increase in global temperature by the end of the century, forest degradation will probably increase abruptly by the middle of the century.” The accumulation of combustible material may trigger mega-fires that, in the intensity suggested by their model of 600 kW/m, [a measure of the amount of fuel contained within a source] will be lethal to most trees.
The intensity of the resulting Amazon mega-fires will depend in large part on the quantity of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, he explained. “If the Paris Agreement is implemented and the increase in global temperatures is held to 2 degrees Celsius [3.6 degrees Fahrenheit], this will reduce the intensity of the fires by 68 percent.”
Unfortunately for the Amazon and humankind, current cumulative national commitments to carbon cuts under the Paris Agreement will undoubtedly result in an overshoot of the 2 degree Celsius limit — with near certain catastrophic results. This circumstance led climate scientist James Hansen to angrily label the Paris Agreement a fraud and a fake.
More than ever, the destiny of the world is interdependent on all humanity. If Brazil is to have a chance at controlling the intensity of fires in the Amazon, it needs all countries — including the U.S. — to successfully reduce carbon emissions. And if the world is to avoid disastrous global warming, it needs Brazil, sooner rather than later, to tackle and reduce forest degradation and deforestation that, if uncurbed, could create runaway mega-fires, greatly increasing carbon emissions. The clock is ticking. The fires are burning.
Map acknowledgments:
FUNAI. “Brazil indigenous lands.” Accessed through Global Forest Watch on October 9, 2017. www.globalforestwatch.org.
IUCN and UNEP-WCMC (), The World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA) [On-line], September, , Cambridge, UK: UNEP-WCMC. Available at: www.protectedplanet.net. Accessed through Global Forest Watch in October 2017. www.globalforestwatch.org
NASA FIRMS. “VIIRS Active Fires.” Accessed through Global Forest Watch on October 9, 2017. www.globalforestwatch.org
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What needs to be done to stop wildfires in drought-killed forests.
A century of fire suppression followed by the worst drought in recorded history has put California’s forest landscapes and water supply at risk.
WITH 17 LARGE wildfires in California igniting in 24 hours this week, October is shaping up to be a brutal month for wildfires, as it often is. It’s too soon to know what caused multiple conflagrations spreading across Northern California’s wine country, but elsewhere in the state dead and dying trees have been the subject of much concern. The five-year drought in California killed more than 102 million trees on national forest lands. That is a gigantic problem in itself that will lead to huge wildfire risks in the future and big changes in wildlife habitat.
With that huge number in mind, it is easy to forget that the forests were already in a sorry state. It’s now widely understood that a century of misguided – but well-intentioned – policies over the past 100 years produced forests that are too densely packed with small trees and too vulnerable to possibly catastrophic fires.
Water supplies are also a concern, because the forests are nature’s water-storage sponges. They capture snowfall and release it slowly, helping Californians survive long, dry summers. But there’s also a concern that overgrown forests consume too much water, and that thinning some forests could generate more runoff.
A new report by the Public Policy Institute of California proposes some different approaches to begin chipping away at the problem. It recommends some changes in state law and new contracting practices, among other things. It also suggests some changes in public attitudes.
To learn more, Water Deeply recently spoke with Van Butsic, the study’s lead author. Butsic is a land system scientist with a Ph.D. in forestry; he works as an assistant cooperative extension specialist in the University of California, Berkeley, Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management.
Water Deeply: How are California’s forests doing in the wake of the drought?
Van Butsic: The drought, coupled with the last century of management actions, caused a huge pulse in tree mortality. There are always dead trees in the woods, but the additional dead trees in the environment due to the drought is about 15 million a year.
One hundred years ago many, many large trees were harvested. Then we have a century of fire suppression, so we take fire out of the equation. So new trees are coming back and they’re not burning. Then, about 30 years ago, we stopped harvesting on most national forests. So we have a condition where the forests are of a much higher density than they’ve ever been before. Then we have the drought, and lots of trees on the landscape are susceptible to bark beetle outbreaks due to lack of water.
Water Deeply: How much additional prescribed fire is needed to bring the forests back to a healthy state?
Butsic: We didn’t quantify that ourselves. But what I would say is, the statistics we’ve seen from a number of good scientists have put the number of additional acres that need to be treated at somewhere between 200,000 and 500,000 per year. So a very large amount. The numbers in those studies come from a historical look at what was normal 100 or 150 years ago. That’s more than a doubling of what’s going on now. So it’s a substantial increase. I want to say that right now the Forest Service is doing somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 per year.
Water Deeply: There’s also a need for more mechanical thinning, or logging. How do we get past the controversy over that?
Butsic: One thing that has happened in California is sort of a distrust of mechanical thinning. Often, when the Forest Service or private landowners say they’re doing mechanical thinning, certain environmental groups think that’s code for clearcutting. One thing we try to say in the paper is this is a valuable tool and it needs to be on the table if we want to get this work done. So making sure mechanical thinning is not written off as code for clearcutting is going to be important if we’re going to manage forests.
Water Deeply: How do we ensure that it’s not clearcutting?
Butsic: There are very strong forest practice laws in California. My understanding of the current regulations governing forest management on federal lands is that in Forest Service Region 5, which California belongs to, it’s really nearly impossible to harvest trees [with a diameter] over 30in (76cm). So these trees are not really at risk, I would say, as long as the Forest Service follows its own recommendations. And yet this is still a stumbling block in conversations about mechanical thinning. People are still very worried about these trees because they’ve seen in the past some large trees disappear. That’s a difficult situation to work with. The laws are in place to protect those trees, and yet people don’t really trust them.
Water Deeply: You recommend state and federal land management agencies justify their continued fire suppression. Why do you suggest that?
Butsic: Most ecologists would agree the long-term suppression of fire has led to a change in forest structure, and probably a decline in forest health. Typically, when agencies do any activity that might cause environmental harm, they need to justify it. We don’t see that for fire suppression. And there’s good reason why you wouldn’t do this on a case-by-case basis. If a fire breaks out around a house, you want to go and put it out. But making sure agencies explain their management choices around wildfire would lead them to use some of their tools, like managed wildfire, more often.
Water Deeply: You report that state law treats wildfire and prescribed fire differently in regard to air quality. Is that still appropriate?
Butsic: There’s a growing body of evidence that prescribed fires are less harmful to humans than non-managed wildfires, because they burn at lower severity, typically. And we know an area burned with a prescribed fire is less likely to burn at high severity in the near future. So clearly, there are long-term air quality benefits to prescribed fire.
But with prescribed fires, there are short-term costs caused by regulation. There’s a lot of planning that needs to go into conducting a prescribed fire for air-quality reasons. And the air-quality reasons are real. We’re not saying people with asthma are not affected by smoke. But we can manage it with prescribed fire and know when the fire is going to happen and know that in the future, we’ll have less risk of severe wildfire. Or we can just leave it to chance and, eventually, we’ll probably get a severe wildfire anyway.
So treating those differently under state law is just problematic.
Water Deeply: What kind of additional mechanical thinning are you calling for?
Butsic: We think mechanical thinning can be really useful in a few ways. If you’re near homes or near roads, mechanical thinning has a very key role to play in those instances. The other is where there are logs that could be harvested that could offset the cost of other treatments. Prescribed fire and managed wildfire are both costly.
There is a number of studies that show mechanical thinning with removal of some sawlogs can be a net profit in certain areas, and the largest trees we looked at removing in the report are 16in (in diameter).
Water Deeply: So why isn’t it happening?
Butsic: There is a number of barriers that we’ve identified to getting the work done. Part of it is the history of distrust. One roadblock is that it is somewhat risky for leadership to try to do these big treatments. If you’re going to do big prescribed fires or let wildfires be managed, there’s risk to the leadership that things could go wrong. And if they do, they look bad. So I do think these groups do not have a risk-taking culture. That’s just not the Forest Service culture. I do think that’s probably hindered them a little bit.
Another barrier is there still are issues with the infrastructure. In some parts of the state, there just are not great places to take the material: sawmills and biomass plants. Some people have said that’s the main roadblock. I’m not sure we agree with that.
Water Deeply: Will these things improve water supply?
Butsic: We think there’s real potential. There’s probably more uncertainty in that science than in other areas. But we do think there’s real potential for the maintenance of the quality and quantity of waters we have today under a healthy forest regime versus an unhealthy one.
Water Deeply: What’s the public’s role? Do we need to be more open-minded about prescribed fire and some kind of logging?
Butsic: I think understanding the role of fire and the necessity of it in the landscape, having the public appreciate the role that fires plays in keeping forests healthy, is something we could improve upon. We need to build the social license to do treatments.
The media often portray fire in the forest as a total destruction. After a fire goes through, it’s not pretty. You see a lot of charred and dead trees. It’s not an appealing landscape. But understanding the long-term importance of having that disturbance on the landscape is certainly something the media could help educate the public on.
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California’s hot summer set the stage for deadly wildfires.
The fires sweeping through Napa and Sonoma wine country could lead to the state's worst wildfire season on record, and it’s not over yet.
As deadly wildfires sweep through California's wine country, fire management experts are blaming their violent speed on the powerful Diablo winds. But the conditions that made the fires so destructive arose from this summer's record-breaking heat—a kind that experts say will continue to fuel fires across much of the West as the planet warms.
The state has seen more than11,200 fires flare up so far this year, putting it on track to outpace the number that hit the state in 2015, which was the country's worst fire season on record, based on acres burned.
October is one of California's peak fire months, so the state may set a new record this year, even if the nation as a whole does not.
The hot, dry Diablo winds that blow across the San Francisco Bay area in the spring and fall were especially fierce late Sunday and Monday, when they whipped up the blazes in the middle of the night across Napa and Sonoma Counties. The fires—which ignited almost simultaneously and spread so quickly that some fused together into larger blazes—have killed at least 15 people and destroyed 2,000 structures, including well-known wineries.
"Gusts were blowing up to 70 miles an hour," said Richard Halsey, executive director of the Chaparral Institute, a conservation group that studies California's fire-prone ecosystems. "There was strong onset, and extremely dry conditions. They sprung up in the middle of the night. A lot of people were asleep, and the fires burned quickly."
What actually ignited the fires is still unclear. Many fire experts and agencies have said downed power lines may have sparked the blazes, which then grew so quickly and powerfully that they jumped ridge-lines and sent embers a half-mile or more ahead of their own path.
On Sunday, the National Weather Service issued a prescient warning that the winds could be dangerous.
Wet Winter, Hot Summer Create Explosive Mix
The fires had an especially ripe mix of fuel that made them explosive.
"The long-term drought is over, but there's still the legacy of that drought in terms of stressed forests. And on top of that we had a wet winter, which meant that the grasses and brush grew like crazy this spring," said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA.
Then, the state experienced its hottest summer on record, with a record heat wave in late August and September that dried vegetation to a crisp. "California summers are always warm and dry, but this one had a particularly warming and drying effect," Swain said. "And we know there's a long-term trend toward warmer and hotter summers."
Already this year, 8.5 million acres have burned across the United States, not including the ongoing California fires. At least 110,000 acres have burned in the wine country fires, and several thousand more are ablaze in Southern California where the Santa Ana winds are fanning flames.
According to an analysis of NASA satellite data by the World Resources Institute's Global Forest Watch Fires, California has experienced 11,273 fire alerts—where satellites detect the heat signatures of fires—as of September. That number was 10,177 in September of 2015.
"It's following very closely with what happened in 2015," said Susan Minnemeyer, a mapping and data manager at WRI. "While 2017 is not a record year across the U.S., in California it is."
Across the nation, wildfires burned more acres in 2015 than any year in modern record keeping, surpassing 10 million acres for the first time. Despite the high number of fires across the West, it's unlikely that 2017 will catch up to that figure. (This year, however, has broken at least one wildfire-related record: The government has spent more than $2 billion fighting fires, making it the most expensive ever.)
Flames Jumping House-to-House
Projections that drought and increased temperatures will continue to fuel fires has sparked a debate over how best to address wildfires, especially as they continue to encroach into urban areas in what's known as the urban-wildland interface.
"This is what was so extraordinary about this event," Swain said. "Essentially it was a forest fire, a wildfire, that moved into an urban area. At some point it was jumping from house to house, not tree to tree."
State law requires property owners to keep vegetation away from their homes in certain fire-prone areas. These areas, known as "defensible spaces," are intended to make structures easier to protect from blazes.
"They talk about defensible space—and that's important," Halsey said. "But more important is why does a home ignite in the first place? It's because these embers are coming, driven by wind, and they ignite patio furniture and get into the attic through vents."
"The fact of the matter is homes burned and things were destroyed because we live in a fire-prone environment," Halsey added. "And we don't build structures that are resistant to fires."
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How California's firestorm spread so mind-bogglingly fast: From 'Diablo' winds to climate trends.
The firestorm that engulfed large parts of Napa and Sonoma Counties in California on Monday will go down in history as one of the worst such events ever recorded in the Golden State.
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How California's firestorm spread so mind-bogglingly fast: From 'Diablo' winds to climate trends
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The firestorm that engulfed large parts of Napa and Sonoma Counties in California on Monday will go down in history as one of the worst such events ever recorded in the Golden State.
By the end of the day on Monday, at least 15 people had been killed, 1,500 or more structures destroyed, and hundreds injured by flames that moved so quickly one hospital had to evacuate patients using nurses' own cars, rather than wait for ambulances to arrive.
The fires show yet again how cruel nature is when the right combination of ingredients come together. Five months of unusually hot and dry weather following the state's record wet winter ensured a ready supply of combustible vegetation.
SEE ALSO: July ties record for warmest month on Earth, but I'm sure we have nothing to worry about
On top of these background conditions, there was a unique combination of weather conditions in place on Sunday night and Monday that ensured that virtually any fire that started would spread rapidly and unpredictably.
COFFEY PARK, SANTA ROSA CALIFORNIA BEFORE THE FIRECOFFEY PARK, SANTA ROSA CALIFORNIA OCTOBER 9TH, 2017
IMAGE: GOOGLE MAPS
IMAGE: CALIFORNIA HIGHWAY PATROL/HANDOUT/EPA-EFE/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
In addition, operating just behind the scenes, like a puppeteer hiding in the shadows, is climate change, which is tilting the odds in favor of extreme heat events and larger fires, even as other factors — such as the buildup of sprawling suburbs close to forested areas — make us more vulnerable to damaging fires.
The fires took thousands by surprise, giving many only enough time to grab their keys, pick up a beloved pet, jump in the car, and flee toward safety. The unlucky ones never made it out in time, and the number of fatalities is expected to rise.
'Diablo winds'
The weather conditions in place across California on Sunday night and Monday were well-known to forecasters as being associated with some of California's worst wildfires.
Hot, dry, and powerful winds were blowing down hillsides, from inland areas to the coast. Such air currents are known as "Diablo" winds in Northern California, and Santa Ana winds in southern parts of the state.
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On Sunday night, the Diablo winds reached as high as 79 miles per hour, which meant that any fires that started quickly raced ahead with the gusts.
"Fire literally exploded and raced along the landscape," the National Weather Service's San Francisco office wrote in a forecast discussion on Monday.
As the air, forced by the circulation around an inland area of high pressure, rushed down hillsides and accelerated through canyons, air temperatures increased, and humidity dropped. One weather station reported a temperature of 91 degrees Fahrenheit at 4:30 a.m. ET on Monday, though the NWS suspects that reading may have been due to a nearby fire.
A burnt out car sits in front of a home destroyed by a wildfire in Santa Rosa, California, on Oct. 9, 2017.
A burnt out car sits in front of a home destroyed by a wildfire in Santa Rosa, California, on Oct. 9, 2017.
IMAGE: JOHN G. MABANGLO/EPA-EFE/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
"Clearly, the biggest single factor in creating yesterday's firestorm were the powerful and incredibly dry east-to-west offshore winds..." said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA. "These kinds of winds have a long history of fueling many of California's most devastating and fast-moving wildfires over the years.
"This includes the 1991 Oakland Hills event, which (until now) had been the benchmark urban-interface wildfire in the Bay Area," he said.
The fires were so intense that descriptions of them are apocalyptic. According to a New York Times dispatch from a neighborhood in Santa Rosa, California, the fire burned virtually everything it touched:
Evidence of the fire’s intensity was everywhere in Coffey Park, which residents described as an apocalyptic scene. The aluminum wheels on cars melted and dripped down driveways like tiny rivers of mercury before hardening. A pile of bottles melded together into a tangle so contorted it looked like a Picasso. Plastic garbage bins were reduced to mere stains on the pavement.
Such extreme fire behavior isn't random, or the result of a single factor. Instead, many ingredients must combine to create such monstrous conflagrations.
"These winds were a necessary condition for the fires' rapid spread, but the broader climate context certainly set the stage for the event to be as bad as it was," Swain said.
Wettest winter, hottest summer
The fires capped off an epic case of weather, or in this case, climate whiplash.
The firestorm is occurring on the heels of the warmest summer in California's history, which featured numerous record-shattering heatwaves, including one that set a new all-time heat record for downtown San Francisco, at 106 degrees Fahrenheit. The hot, largely dry summer helped to dry out the vegetation that bloomed in the wake of Northern California's wettest winter.
Summer temperature departures from average for California, showing that 2017 had the hottest summer on record.
Summer temperature departures from average for California, showing that 2017 had the hottest summer on record.
IMAGE: NCEI
The wet winter, in turn, followed the state's worst drought in modern history, which lasted for 5 years.
Such weather whiplash, from cool, wet conditions, to hot and dry weather, is becoming a telltale sign of the new normal, as global warming reshapes the long-term climate and raises the odds of both extreme precipitation events and heat waves.
Heat waves are one of the clearest, best understood indicators of human-caused global warming. Such extreme events are becoming more severe, frequent, and longer lasting as the overall climate warms, and this past summer, it was the West's turn to roast.
In July, normally hot Death Valley, California managed to reach a dubious milestone for the planet. With an average monthly temperature of 107.4 degrees Fahrenheit, Death Valley saw the warmest month ever recorded for any location in the world, according to the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang blog.
The heat, particularly the relentless heat waves in September, played a crucial role in setting the stage for the devastating fires.
"[The] record heat in early September capped an already extremely warm and dry summer to date, which acted to dry out vegetation even more than would typically be the case this time of year," Swain said. He added that the heat, following the wet winter, causes seasonal grasses and brush to grow, which is known to firefighters as "fine fuels."
"Finally, the longer-term context of record multi-year drought just a year or so ago meant that some of the region's forests remain residually stressed. The net effect: 'fuel moistures' (the amount of water in vegetation) were at or near record-low values when these wind-driven fires ignited, which almost certainly contributed to the extreme rate of spread and the likelihood of spot fire ignition during this firestorm," Swain said.
A horse runs from the flames from a massive wildfire, in Napa, Calif. on Oct. 9, 2017.
A horse runs from the flames from a massive wildfire, in Napa, Calif. on Oct. 9, 2017.
IMAGE: AP/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
According to Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University, global warming has increased fire risk across the West, and raised the odds that hot and dry conditions will coincide.
"I am careful not to make any attribution statements without having run formal analysis," Diffenbaugh said in an email. "That being said, we know that hot, dry conditions increase fire risk. Even though we had a wet winter this year, we know that the protracted drought drastically stressed vegetation in California (including killing tens of millions of trees), and that the summer and early fall have been extremely hot in California and the Bay Area."
"We also know from previously published work that [human-caused] global warming has increased fire risk in the western United States, and my published work has shown that global warming has increased the odds of the co-occurring warm and dry conditions that caused the California drought and the odds of extremely warm conditions in California," he added.
"So, although we don’t yet have formal analyses of this particular event, we do have a lot of evidence that global warming has influenced the conditions in which the event is occurring."
Given the property damage involved, these fires could rank as another billion dollar event in a year that’s turning into an extremely costly one — both in dollars and lives — for the United States. Given climate change projections for a hotter, drier future in the West, perhaps we'd better get used to it.
WATCH: Los Angeles is painting their roads white to cool the city down and improve air quality
TOPICS: CALIFORNIA, CALIFORNIA WILDFIRES, CLIMATE, CLIMATE-ENVIRONMENT, FIRE, FIRESTORM, HEAT WAVE, NAPA VALLEY, SCIENCE, SONOMA-VALLEY, WILDFIRES
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Jane Goodall: "Giving up hope won't save the planet. Ending poverty might."
We haven't inherited this planet from our parents; we've borrowed it from our children.
We are destroying the world at a very rapid rate, and an awful lot of people are just giving up hope and thinking, "Well, there's nothing I can do." The rain forests are disappearing everywhere. Big dams are draining whole countries of their water supply: The famous Serengeti, in Tanzania, is threatened by a dam in Kenya; and the Nile is being threatened by a huge dam in Ethiopia. There's mining, there's fracking, there's drilling for oil. We're in the middle of the sixth great species extinction; we're losing biodiversity in place after place. We're burning fossil fuels very, very fast.
We are breeding billions of animals to eat them, and that means that whole habitats are being destroyed to grow grain, masses of fossil fuel are being used to take the grain to the animals, the animals to slaughter, the meat to the table. In addition, the animals are producing masses of methane gas with their digestion, and that's a very virulent greenhouse gas.
Not only is the ice in the Arctic and Antarctic melting, but, very frighteningly, the permafrost is, too, releasing even more methane. This plus carbon dioxide, and a couple of other gasses, are blanketing the earth and trapping the heat of the sun. And that's led to climate change with terrible hurricanes and flooding and droughts.
There are certain things that must be done if we're to put the world right. One is alleviating poverty. Because if you're living in desperate poverty, you're going to continue destroying the environment in order to live.
People understand perfectly well that cutting down the last trees in a desperate effort to grow food is going to lead to terrible erosion. That erosion, in turn, will lead to the silting up of the water. Meanwhile, if you live in an urban area — including the U.S. — and you're very poor, then you buy the cheapest food. You can't afford to ask yourself how many miles did the food travel, did it harm the environment, did it result in animals suffering, did it involve child slave labor and so on.
But, we do need to start thinking how everybody else can lead more sustainable lives, particularly the very rich. There's just so much waste. That's partly because food isn't priced properly; there's no account made in the prices of cheap food for the cost that's very often involved in producing it.
The wealthy need to start thinking about their environmental footprint — what do I buy, what do I eat, what do I wear, how was it made, where did it come from — and thinking whether they need all the stuff that they buy and how they could live in more environmentally sustainable ways.
The urgent message is that, if we carry on with business as usual, then there's very little hope for sustaining human life on this planet in the manner to which people aspire today. The reason for all my lecturing is to, first of all, try and raise awareness about what's happening and, secondly, to try and help people understand there is something that can be done. So, for instance, by working with the MasterClass, I hope this message, and a whole lot more besides, can get out to a much, much wider audience.
One of the other programs that the Jane Goodall Institute supports is a humanitarian and environmental program for young people called Roots & Shoots. It started with 12 high school students in Tanzania, and now has members from kindergarten through university in 100 countries. The program's main message is that every individual makes a difference every day. Every group chooses itself three projects that are pertinent to the area around them that can make things better for people, for animals and for the environment — everything from planting trees to recycling to raising money for victims of earthquakes and hurricanes to growing organic food.
Of course, they also learn about what's going on in the world, how everything is interconnected and the urgency of trying to do something about it. And even if the young people in the program don't continue with the volunteer work, they certainly continue with an understanding of their life's impact.
I meet people all over Tanzania, and they say to me, "Well, it taught me that the environment is terribly important and I must try and preserve it. I'm getting my children involved Roots & Shoots in their school." In China, where we have about 2,000 groups, people tell me, "Well, of course, I care about the environment because I was in your Roots & Shoots program in primary school. Of course, I care about animals, I watched your documentaries about chimpanzees when I was in primary school."
I find that young people — when they know the problem, when you listen to them, when they're then empowered to take action — they just roll up their sleeves and get out there and go to work. And, as young people learn more, they are influencing their parents, they're influencing their grandparents — and some of them already are in high positions.
You very often hear that we haven't inherited this planet from our parents; we've borrowed it from our children. But, the way we're living today, we're stealing. We have been stealing for years, and we're still stealing their future today. In many places, we are using up more of the finite natural resources of the planet than nature can replenish. People have to start thinking. We have a window of opportunity for making some changes, for slowing down climate change. But it's going to require much more effort.
As told to THINK editor Megan Carpentier, edited and condensed for clarity.
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