- Fire is a form all of its own. Is it alive or is it dead or is it an entirely separate form of existence? What is fire? Dead things always occupy a place. Dirt and rocks, mountains and lakes, sand and skeletons. They can take different forms though water turns to ice rock turns to sand. They never fully disappear. They change form. So is fire dead? Maybe, but it seems to behave differently. Well then is it alive? It's like living things.
It has will a will of its own and it lusts for more fuel, more growth and it moves by its own power and it can be cunning hiding in embers under ashes suddenly to flare up long after those who had left it thought it had vanished. But if living things die sooner or later and fire is not living, it does not die, does not rot. It just vanishes from the face of the earth only to reappear exactly as before in trying to make sense of something, something that's unexplainable.
Where do we turn? Well science, which as you know is what this show is all about. In trying to make sense of fire though most scientists focus on only one of its many facets. How it starts, how it moves, how it smokes, how it's managed. But as I said before, fire seems to be something more than just the sum of its parts. It's something different and it's not fully understood even by the people and the generations of people who have dedicated their lives to trying to understand it.
Today the forest service has over a hundred scientists working to study fire and there have been others for over a hundred years before them. But after talking to about 20 of these scientists, fire still exceeds any single explanation, any single story. Which is why this season of forest cast is many stories like a fire. This series is composed of many elements. It'll be a patchwork of voices that'll burn into one another.
Their science stories and perspectives burning together, backing away flanking in new directions. Repetitive topics and themes run between. At times they'll flow together and connect at others. They'll interrupt and contradict and it's this contradictory nature that defines fire and makes it one of the most perplexing elements to try and understand. But there is a simple way to understand fire. Think of a swarm, a swarm of bees or starling or mosquitoes. A spreading fire is just that.
A swarm, a swarm of ignitions. A series of small fires over and over is what builds into ablaze. In our series, season four of forest cast is just that A series of fires, a series of voices. It's a 360 view of fire from a scientific standpoint. It's the story of how fire research shapes our landscapes and our lives. And episode one is understanding fire. How fire, fire history and fire research behave. I'm John Yells, act one, what is fire?
- My name is Sarah McAllister and I'm a research mechanical engineer with the forest service at the Missoula Fire Sciences lab. And I study fire behavior. I grew up or I inherited I guess the family's Volkswagen Beetle when I turned 16. So I spent a fair amount of my high school and college years driving that around and working on it with my dad. And that kind of really triggered me to wanna understand combustion a lot more so that I could understand how my car worked a lot more.
So when I went to grad school, I went in to study combustion and ended up studying fire, got really interested in studying and looking at understanding the fire ecology part of it. But coming from that combustion background, right, the flaming and smoldering, the fire behavior, how heat's transferred, how things ignite were really intriguing to me and really built off of my mechanical engineering background and studying all of the combustion aspects of it.
So what is fire? That is kind of a hard question to answer, right? And there's a lot of other words we use around fire, right? We, we use fire, we use flames, we use combustion. I mean those are all things that are all packed into that word like combustion. We talk about combustion. What is combustion? Well there's actually a whole field of engineering that studies combustion which is distinct from a whole field of engineering that studies fire.
But usually when we talk about combustion in the field that where we study that we're talking about ways that we can harness combustion to benefit us, right? It's how we can develop car engines, it's how we heat our homes, it's how we cook. So in that sense, combustion is always sort of been a good thing. But fire and the whole field of studying fire is really aimed at protecting us from fire because almost in no circumstances is fire in a building a good thing, right?
So we're usually talking about fire as bad, but while in fire is also yet another unique thing, right? Because depending on the context, fire could be either good or bad but there's all sorts of things kind of buried in this, right? So flames and and smoldering are two types of combustion that are very important for wildland fire.
Smoldering is really important for understanding what happens to the the fire effects and that's the kind of combustion that you would see for example in the coals of your fire pit. But flaming combustion is kind of where the action is, right? That's the one that we usually talk about or what we usually think about when we talk about fire and flaming combustion is what you see when gases burn. So you have to heat up a solid fuel and to make gaseous fuel in order to see a flame.
And when I think about molecules of fire, right, that's what we're really talking about are the flames of a fire and gases burning. And there's actually two types of flames depending on how your fuel and air are mixed or not mixed. In a car engine for example, you have carburetors or fuel injectors that inject the fuel, your liquid fuel at that point into the hot engine, turns it to a gas and it immediately mixes with the air and then you spark it and it burns.
So in that case your combustion is happening in a pre-mixed mode, which is different from a wild land fire or a candle flame where the fuel that you're burning is actually being produced By heating up that solid fuel, it begins to break down and make a gaseous fuel. And that process is called pyrolysis. So that gaseous fuel is separate from air when it before it actually burns.
So it only makes us right at that moment of where it ignites and and burns and those are non pre-mixed or diffusion flames. But it's also really a a flame that you see on a day-to-day basis as a candle flame. So you can understand a lot about flame structure and everything just by looking at a simple candle flame.
And that's something that's a lot more available and easy to pee for people to, you know, play around with and investigate on their own but a little bit more safely than a wildland fire. So candle flame is a pretty classic example of a non premixed diffusion flame. In order to get your candle to burn, you take a lighter to the wick and when you do that, what you're doing is you're melting the wax. So the Mel liquid wax then kind of travels up that wick by adhesion and cohesion they call it.
But basically you know like why water will travel up a piece of paper or something when you get it wet. So that liquid wax travels up that wick and it hits the heat of the flame either from your lighter or once it's actually sustained burning and it then turns to a gas. So that gaseous fuel now then starts to travel or diffuse, which is why they call it a diffusion flame.
So it moves away from that wick towards the oxygen and once it hits the oxygen at the right proportions it will actually burn and you'll see that flame. But as it travels from the wick to the flame, what you see as a characteristic part of the flame is the orange color, right? So as it's moving away from the wick toward the flame, that bunch of the carbon of the wax actually gets molecularly excited and begins to vibrate and it gives off light in that characteristic yellow color.
So that's why we see a candle flame as yellow, it's fact that's why we see most flames as a yellow flames because of that carbon that's in it that's very similar to a wildland fuel, right? Because it also has carbons and hydrogens and oxygens in it. The only difference between a candle flame and a wildland flame is the fact that there's no liquid state of it. When we go and heat say a piece of wood up, the process is just exactly the same except it's not evaporating, it's lyzz.
So we heat it up, the molecules of the wood begin to break apart the cellulose, the lignin and all of that are chains of they call hydrocarbons carbon, hydrogen and oxygen all linked together. But when they get hot they become unstable and some of it starts to break off in chunks. So all of the components of wood are really large molecules that won't melt, that won't evaporate until you break 'em into little pieces.
So that breaking things down into little pieces part to make a gas is called pyrolysis. So when you go to put your match on a piece of wood, that heating process is breaking those molecules down hydrolyzing all of these gases that are coming off of it and they're escaping from the solid and they're mixing with air and you're sitting there with your pilot light or a spark or something and for a long time you could be producing gases off of that fuel and have nothing happen.
And that's because that mixture that's sitting above that fuel is not at the flammability limit yet it's too lean to burn. So if you think about like if you're playing with your lawn mower or something, right, you could change the mixture of your your engine and basically make it not run right if you turn the fuel down too far.
So that's, that's basically where we are now with heating up our fuel is at some point you have fuel but it's not enough to burn so you have to keep heating it up and keep heating it up and more and more fuel start to be produced. And at some point you actually do hit that lean flammability limit where you have just enough fuel to burn. So your pilot light, your flame or your lighter or whatever can actually ignite that mixture.
But right at that flammability limit you probably don't have enough heat to sustain burning that flame once it starts to like try to attach to the solid fuel is gonna transfer heat back to that solid fuel and like lose a little bit of momentum, right? So you have to keep heating it up. And so you might get a couple of false starts and we call that flashing ignition.
You might see a couple of really brief little flashes and they happen really, really fast like milliseconds in between each other before finally you heat just enough to get a sustained flame. So the point of ignition is actually where that establishing flame generates enough heat to offset the losses back to the environment and to the fuel itself the solid fuel.
So it's, it's for the nerds in the room, it's really a fascinating process to understand how those little different pieces come together. And I mean the candles is a great place to start to understand like what is a flame but wildlife fire has so many more questions involved to even start to chip away at. I think studying ignition is really important because it's part of understanding fire behavior, it's part of the whole cycle of life of how fire spreads.
We're all taught the fire triangle, right, that in order for fire to happen you need fuel, oxygen and heat. So in order for a fire to spread something has to be lit on fire first, right? You have to have an IGN initial ignition and that fuel then burns at a particular rate and releases heat at a particular rate and some of that heat is then transferred to unburnt fuel ahead of the fire. And really that's where the fire triangle comes into play.
Again, you have to have the right combination of fuel, oxygen and heat for that next ignition step to be happening. So I mean I really think of fire spread as applications of fire triangle over and over and over again for that each ignition step like dominoes and what we know of it. I mean the basic understanding of ignition has been around for a few decades.
That explanation I gave is fairly straightforward for a normal fuel for example a piece of wood or a piece of polymer or something that might be in your home. But the challenge is trying to apply that understanding to all the various fuels in the wildland fire context in particular live fuels. So how fuel is generated and how fuel is released might be very different in a live wildland fuel because of its structure, because of its chemical composition.
All of those things vary depending on the species of fuel, what growing stage it's in, whether it's a new needle or an old needle, whether it's spring, whether it's summer, whether it's fall. And trying to understand some of the nuances there is very challenging and we don't understand a lot of that ignition process right now. So some of the work I've done to try to understand ignition and live fuels has been to try to understand if possible what the role of water is, right?
So live fuel tends to have a lot of water in it, right? We're talking moisture contents of over a hundred percent, which means there's more massive water in there than there's massive actual like fuel that can burn. And this is a really like hard thing to get your head around because a live fuel will ignite and burn and say 120% moisture content just fine in a crown fire.
And yet a dead fuel like a dead pine needle on the ground won't ignite and burn a much past 15 20% depending on where you are and what circumstances you're in. But a general acknowledge like moisture of extinction for a dead fuel that's well below what a live fuel can have while it ignites and burn.
So we've been trying to sort of suss that out by doing some ignition experiments with live fuels different times of year during the growing season to understand or just even track how ignition behavior varies with moisture content and is if moisture content is even a, the good way of describing a live fuel, right?
So it's really unclear at this point what's driving live fuel behavior because we've got different species, we've got different growing seasons, they all have different chemical compositions. So it's hard to understand whether or not the actual composition of the live fuel is what's driving it, the differences between species and and during the growing season or the fact that there's a structural difference between live fuels and dead fuels and the way it stores water, right?
So especially some live fuels certain species, think about a chaparral species or a pie needle or whatever things that grow where it doesn't rain in the summer for example, where fires are tend to have really waxy coatings on them 'cause they really wanna hold onto that moisture because it won't rain for a few months so it needs to hold on to whatever water it can.
And so the question is, is whether or not that structure on the outside of the fuel affects the way it ignites because it essentially like heats up and bursts like popcorn, right? We're not really sure if it's some of the chemical differences between these fuels that influence its ignition behavior or if it's that structure that's influencing them.
And it's really hard to tease the two apart, which is why it's very like challenging to study this, this problem and try to get any like real clear answers. It's really hard to break down these individual pieces to study, you know, okay, what's going on with the chemistry, what's going on with the structure, what's driving, what behavior? 'cause they, we can't do these experiments that easily.
Everything is all integrated into one package and we're left pretty much stuck with what nature gives us until for example, I don't know, 3D printing or something gets amazing and we could like literally build our own live fuels and fer these things ourselves. So we're kind of left kind of, I mean I don't wanna say we, we we're really struggling with trying to understand how it all comes together with a live fuel.
So our models that we have right now operationally don't really treat live fuel any differently than a dead fuel. Until we understand how live fuels ignite and burn, we can't do anything better with our modeling for either Crown fire or prescribed fire - Act two, the past, present and future of fire research.
- I'm Greg Dillon, I am the director of the Fire Modeling Institute, which is part of the Rocky Mountain Research station of the US Forest Service and I work at the Fire Sciences lab in Missoula, Montana. I think it's super important that we have the context that we're working within, which I think it's really important to recognize what's been done before us.
You know, there's that phrase about science, like we stand on the shoulders of giants and everything I do is hopefully building upon work that people who came before me have done. And if I'm not aware of that work and I'm not aware of that history that I fit into, then I'm not gonna be able to make my work as relevant to everything else that's out there. Timeline really starts in 1905 with the founding of the US Forest Service as part of the Department of Agriculture.
It wasn't very long after that in 1910 that we experienced what's known as the big burn or the great burn. - On August 20th, 1910, the wind began to blow in the Northern Rockies and didn't stop for two days, hundreds of small fires cyclone in a perfect storm that would consume anything in its path - And really was an eyeopener, I think for this young agency about how devastating wildfire can be to forest resources.
- Fire lines that held for days were overrun by 70 mile per hour blasts of wind and flame over 3 million acres would burn in just two days. - And so with the focus on forestry from the perspective of growing trees and and wood products, fire was seen as the enemy as a result of that event in 1910. And events sort of unfolded after that. That led to really kind of an all out war against fire for a while in the forest service.
And so by 1935, the Forest Service had adopted a policy that became known as the 10:00 AM policy. It - Was basically an informal policy that any fire spotted would put it out to by 10 o'clock the next morning. - It was suppress all fires as much as we possibly can and or in 1944 the Smokey Bear campaign was launched, - It's all gone now and it won't be back in our lifetime either. So think before you strike, put the life out of your campfires before the campfires put the life out of the forest.
- And that has become one of the the most successful ad campaigns in the world. Smokey Bear is a symbol that's recognized by people around the world and his message of, you know, preventing forest fires. - Remember only you can prevent forest fires. Only you - Through the middle part of the 20th century, the Forest Service had this full suppression mindset that fire was all bad, there was no benefit from fire.
Now there were always dissenting voices that worked against that and said, Hey look, fires and ecological process, we can't extinguish it all the time. We probably shouldn't extinguish it all the time. And so some of that current started to rise up more as we got into the 1960s and seventies. So we saw in the late sixties on the National Park Service starting to adopt natural fire policies and some of their larger parks.
- I should point out that prescribed burns are monitored from the very beginning. It is not a matter of let burn, but a matter of management of that fire. - And by the early seventies, you know, Yellowstone had a policy of allowing naturally ignited fires within the park. - I'm getting increasingly tired of hearing newspaper reports that we let fires burn. Actually every fire, not only in Yellowstone but in other areas is monitored from the very, very beginning.
Like other managers of wildlands, we took a long time to reach this stage of thought. For many years, fire was the enemy - In the forest service. The Southway Bitterroot wilderness was a large contiguous wilderness area and they also started to allow for managed fire as part of their wilderness fire management plan. And so we started seeing this mix in the late 20th century of allowing some fire for benefit on the landscape. But then in 1988 we experienced the Yellowstone fires.
- Firefighters were battling brush and forest fires in eight Western states today. 13 of those fires were burning in Wyoming's Yellowstone National Park. The worst outbreak since the late 18 hundreds. 1 9700 acre blaze was located six miles from old faithful geyser. But park officials said the fire posed no immediate threat. - We saw 1.2 million acres burn in Yellowstone in 1988. It was all over the news - In this country.
A stubborn fire today forced hundreds of tourists from a cabin development area in Yellowstone National Park. The tourists were ordered to leave the 600 cabin site in the western part of the park after flames from a 92,000 acre fire edged within two miles. The fire is one of 10 burning in the park and being battled by 4,000 firefighters augmented by 1200 soldiers from Fort Lewis Washington. - It was a level of fire that this country hadn't really seen since before 1910.
And so it made a lot of people question, you know, whether we really should be allowing fires to burn in these large areas like large national parks and wilderness areas. - Firefighters in the Yellowstone National Park continued to get some help. Today about 550 Marines from Camp Pendleton, California were airlifted into the area. Eventually 1200 Marines and 1400 army personnel are expected. President Reagan was briefed on the Yellowstone fire this afternoon by two of his cabinet members.
While in Yellowstone, secretary Hodel had questioned a park service policy of letting forest lands burn this morning, Mr. Reagan said he was unaware of that policy. - In the aftermath of that, we also saw the recovery of those forests and people were able to tell the story pretty well about the fiery ecology of the types of forests that burned in Yellowstone, those lodgepole pine forests that really require high intensity fire to regenerate.
That's one particular tree species that needs fire for its seeds to come outta the cones. And so we were able to successfully tell the story of the regeneration that can come from fire and not just devastation. So by 1995, that debate resulted in an updated feral wildland fire management policy that did recognize wildfire as a natural occurrence. It gave the agencies like Forest Service and the DOI land management agencies quite a bit of leeway in allowing for fire on their lands.
But we have continued to kind of operate largely in a suppression mindset. Our society still mostly sees wildfire as a negative thing and so there's a lot of pressure to put out fires as much as we can. When you then look at the fire science as it's developed alongside all of that, if we look back to the early 19 hundreds, there were of course forest researchers at that time, but it was really in the early 1920s. Around 1922 there was a scientist named Harry Gisborne.
- I think his philosophy was that we weren't doing research just for the law of doing research. We in effect we're working for the field man working to get his research results in the meaningful application - Who began doing a lot of foundational research in northern Idaho at the Priest River Experimental Forest.
And a lot of it was looking at just weather observations and monitoring fuel moisture and really trying to get a better understanding of how these different environmental conditions affected burning conditions. And then move forward a few decades, we had a young smoke jumper program. - Fire agencies used planes to parachute supplies to look out towers and firefighters. The success of this technique led to the idea of dropping the firefighters themselves.
In 1939, men wearing special protective clothing safely made 58 jumps onto a variety of terrain from open meadows to dense forest. - Again, kind of going along with that idea of an all out war against wildfire and suppression of all fires. And in 1949 there was an incident in central Montana on the Helena National Forest. The Man Gulch fire. - Lightning sparked a fire on the ridge above the gulch on the hot afternoon of August 5th, 1949, 15 smoke jumpers landed at the upper end of Man Gulch.
- It was what seemed to be a relatively small and insignificant fire, but with the environmental conditions and the way that that fire was burning in a gulch, it jumped the gulch and caught the smoke jumpers by surprise and ended up trapping them - As it started to burn uphill in their direction. Dodge called for his crew to retreat a wall of flames was speeding up the gulch 15 feet every second. The man started to race for their lives.
- And so that was the largest fatality that the Forest Service had seen as a result of firefighting efforts up until that time. And it was really an eye-opener that we needed to have a better understanding of the conditions that we were sending firefighters into.
As a direct result of that incident in 1949, there was a lot of lobbying for funding to increase our fire research capabilities and that culminated in the opening of three fire research labs in the forest Service around 1960, the Fire Sciences laboratory in Missoula, Montana was opened. There were also labs started in Macon, Georgia and Riverside, California.
And they had the express purpose of researching as much as we could about fire behavior to make sure that we could try and not put firefighters into the same situations that they were caught in, in man gch. So that really started the true program of fire research in the forest service.
And then in that initial decade of science at the Missoula lab, a number of scientists were brought in from other disciplines to try and come up with empirical equations to predict the spread of fire so that we could start to build models and do predictions and understand how fire moves.
And so one of those scientists was Dick Rothermell. What - We've brought to you through the training and the modeling are some new tools that they don't force you, but they show you what you ought to be looking at and how you can organize it and bring it to bear on a fire problem.
- He and a whole team of others at the lab in that first decade developed this empirical fire spread equation, which has since become known as the Rother Mill spread equation that was published in 1972 and it really continues to be the driving engine in most of our operational fire models today.
And it does describe fire spread under certain conditions that were very sort of controlled in the laboratory and we've built all kinds of computer models around that equation since then and learned how to sort of manipulate them and calibrate them in such a way that we can get good predictive information about fires on our landscapes. But moving forward, you know, when Dick Rothermell first put that equation out, it was simply a point based equation.
We didn't have any spatial data, we didn't have geographic information systems at that time to be able to, to look at that and and map it out across landscapes. But as technology advanced, we started to see more and more of that. And some of the researchers at the fire lab, like Mark Finney started to implement that rothermell spread equation into computer programs that could predict fire spread across landscapes. We understood what kind of spatial data we needed to feed those models.
And then in the early two thousands the land fire program came around, which was a joint effort between the Forest Service and USGS to map fuels and vegetation consistently across the whole United States so that we could have the data to feed this fire modeling across the entire country. So that was really transformative in our ability to think about how these fire models could be applied across all winds in the country.
And that was around the same time that the national cohesive wildland fire management strategy was being developed. - The focus of this legislation is clearly the creation of a catastrophic wildfire fund, but the bill also calls for a cohesive wildland fire management strategy.
- And so the combination of the modeling tools that were available with that overarching vision of how we should be thinking about fire management has shifted the way we think about science application in the field of fire management. You know, in the last say 10 to 15 years.
For me, looking at this kind of timeline with that ROTHERMELL spread equation being published in 1972. 1972 also happened to be the year that the LANsat program, which derives a lot of the satellite information that we used to map fuels and vegetation. That program has started in 1972. I was born in 1972 and so it kind of for me like ties in really nicely. And then my education was in geography.
I actually had no intention of having a career in wildfire, but I got introduced to geographic information systems or GIS through my college education, worked for the forest service for a little while and then went back and got a master's degree that focused on forest ecology and that's where I got introduced to fire ecology and fire dynamics as part of natural healthy ecosystems.
Fast forward a little bit, I was working for the forest service after grad school and well, in 2000 I was working for the Forest Service in North Carolina and it was a bad fire year here in Montana, - More than 60 major wildfires continue to burn across 11 western states today. One of the worst forced hundreds of people to leave their homes in Montana's Bitterroot Valley. It burned eight houses and threatened hundreds more.
All told this is the nation's worst fire season in 50 - Years and they were putting together interagency ad hoc hand crews to go out on fires.
And so we actually got sent down to southeast Idaho, which is largely BLM country, a lot of sagebrush and pinon juniper on the hills and in the sagebrush in the draws there and in the valleys and working on fires in that kind of environment, it was a lot of air show with, with small single engine air tankers, the seats, they're basically little crop dusting planes and they're outfitted with a reservoir that can hold fire retardant and they are so highly maneuverable.
So they would dive really low in these valleys that we were working in and be able to climb out and just drop retardant with almost pinpoint accuracy on, you know, lines that we'd been digging and just really impressive how skilled those pilots were, how maneuverable those little aircraft are.
When my dad was an Air Force pilot, I grew up around air shows and so yeah, seeing those, those planes operate in tight quarters and and really hug close to the contours of the landscape was pretty impressive. The second assignment was completely different where we got bused down to a Clear Creek fire on the Salmon Chaus National Forest, which was one of the bigger fires that year and had a giant fire camp right outside of Sam and Idaho.
And just that assignment was the eye-opener of how huge an effort these large fires are. Just how many crews, how many pieces of equipment get staged in those big fire camps and just being a pawn in the machinery a little bit, buses and buses of firefighters, you know, we pick up size engines basically lots of heavy equipment staged in different places, yurts and trailers and all the sleeping areas for all the crews with their tents.
You know, you're living with the people that you're put together with through two weeks in very close quarters for a couple of weeks.
It actually helped me to see that I didn't wanna do that because when you're at the bottom rung as a type two firefighter, you have very little say in what you do and and I, I had already finished grad school at that point and I was like, I know that I, I would like to do something where I can contribute to how we're developing strategy and how we're thinking about how we approach these problems.
And so I learned a ton from those four weeks spent on fires in summer of 2000 and then continued working for the forest service, mostly in GIS and and ecology type positions. But when the land fire program was starting up its national mapping effort, in 2004 the fire lab hired a bunch of geospatial analysts, GIS analysts to help with that work.
And given my background in ecology and some other stuff that I had done, I was brought onto the land fire team to be the team lead for potential vegetation mapping. And then just being at the fire lab once that round of national mapping for land fire was done, moved into doing research related to burn severity using satellite data and then started doing all kinds of geospatial analyses to fire and fire management.
That led me into the Fire Modeling Institute or FMI where I, I did lots of different spatial analyses using outputs of fire behavior models. We do a lot of mapping of wildfire hazard and risk across landscapes as broad as the whole United States.
And so started doing a lot of that and then in more recent years I've moved into being the director of FMI, which really puts me in a great position to be able to apply all the signs of technology to the questions that our agency faces with wildfire crisis strategy or any of the other large management efforts that we have. - In January, we released a 10 year strategy and implementation plan for confronting the wildfire crisis.
We will dramatically increase fuels and forest health treatments by up to four times the current treatment levels in the west over the next 10 years. We'll place treatments over and above our current treatment levels. We will treat up to an additional 20 million acres of national forest system lands. We will work with partners to treat up to an additional 30 million acres of other federal, state, tribal and private lands.
And then we'll follow up with maintenance treatments at intervals of 10 to 15 years. - In the last few years we've had some landmark pieces of legislation passed by Congress that have directed a lot of money to the forest service specifically to address wildfire risk.
And that has resulted in what Forest Service is calling the wildfire crisis strategy, which is really meant to be kind of a whole new way to think about how we are managing the lands with respect to fire and fire risk and particularly in the Western us.
And so it's directed billions of dollars to the Forest Service and DOI agencies to implement new work on the ground to reduce wildfire risk to communities and infrastructure and natural resources and other values where our agency is investing quite a bit of money that's coming in from the bipartisan infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act.
- I signed a law once in a generation investments, donations, roads, highways, bridges, railroads, ports, airports, the law's gonna deliver clean air, safer water systems, eliminating lead pipes, electric grid to deliver clean energy, high speed internet, electric charging stations all across America. It's called the bipartisan infrastructure law. It's the most significant investment America has made in our infrastructure.
Literally not figuratively since the interstate highway system built by Dwight d Eisenhower. - You know, we've been doing fuel treatment work on these forests for a long time. We've been doing forest vegetation management for a long time with different goals and objectives, but specifically having the objective to reduce risk to neighboring communities and critical infrastructure means thinking a little bit differently about how we go about doing that work.
And so a lot of that money is directed to the field units who have those landscapes to get that work done. But some of that money has also been directed to Forest Service research to help provide new science but also to apply existing science in ways that can be useful in meeting those goals of reducing risk. And that's really affected my day-to-Day significantly over the last year and a half to two years.
What we're doing is we're bringing a lot of data and analytical methods that have been in development for a couple decades and they've been deployed and applied in a lot of ways, but we're trying to really streamline a lot of that in a way that's very applicable and useful to these landscapes.
So using modeling we can, we can start to get a sense for what parts of a landscape does it make sense to do fuel treatments where you'll actually get a benefit out of it in terms of reducing the risk to some of these neighboring resources and assets.
And then since January we've been working on developing a first set of outcome performance measures around these risk concepts so that we can say, okay, if we look at January of 2021 is a starting point and the end of fiscal year 23 is an ending point in those two and a half or so years, how much change has happened on the landscape? And can we use the modeling framework that we have to actually quantify that? And for each landscape we can say how much have we reduced the risk?
And for the communities that are adjacent to those landscapes, how much have we seen risk actually reduce on those landscapes? And then we're gonna be presenting that to the chief here within the next month because Congress of course gave the Forest Service a lot of this money and they wanna see that we're we're making good on their investment. And so it's really an interesting way that r and d is being given an opportunity to show up and and provide to that conversation.
You know, the fires of 2000, that was a big year and after that we saw the national fire plan. - I think we're at a very important turning point right now. The National Fire plan really is the beginning of the solution - And that also was a huge influx of funding. A lot of that went to increasing our suppression capabilities.
And I wasn't quite in fire at that time, but a lot of my colleagues who were in fire research at that time when they saw the funding coming through for the crisis strategy were kind of aware of how the fire plan national fire plan back in the early two thousands played out and really wanted to make sure that with this new funding for the crisis strategy, we try to make more substantive change in the way we think about fire and the way we manage fire.
And I think there's the potential for that to happen depends what day you catch me on if I have my optimist or pessimist hat on. We hear a lot about the crisis strategy being a paradigm shift in how we think about fire. - It will take a paradigm shift to confront the wildfire crisis facing the nation. The old paradigm is to use our limited fonts and capacity to scatter treatments randomly across the landscapes to the best of our limited ability.
The new paradigm is to step up the pace and scale of our treatments to match the actual scale of wildfire risk across the landscape.
- Sometimes the way that that's worded I feel like misses the Mark A. Little bit because that paradigm shift really needs to be about moving us from thinking reactively around wildfire to thinking proactively and everything that that means, including accepting and being open to the idea of fire as a beneficial force on the landscape using a lot more prescribed fire on the landscape.
And if we can do that and we can use this as an opportunity to truly change that paradigm, then yeah, I think it is something different where wildfires can happen maybe in the back country but also maybe in close proximity and they won't result in the loss of property and life. They won't be human disasters, they'll simply be natural events.
But I think we do culturally need to sort of shift to learning how to coexist with fire because it is part of our landscapes and we're not going to ever eliminate it. We're not going to get rid of it. And so being able to do the work on the landscapes so that that can happen and that yeah, we can have fires that don't turn into disasters. - Act three, the history of fire, where was it? Where is it? And what can be done knowing its history.
- I am Dan Day, I'm assistant director of research for the Northern research station and I am located in Columbia, Missouri. It's always good to know something about the history of what you're working on and in this case we can learn a lot about the history of fire in our forest from a number of places. There's pollen and charcoal studies and you can see which species dominance and abundance changes and distribution changes.
And the charcoal sediments will give you some indication of the extent and frequency or magnitude of the fire in those areas. But that gives you kind of a fire history at a really coarse scale of time and space. And using tree rings which are annual growth rings that a tree puts on as it grows in diameter and then it goes dormant with each cycle of the year.
You can, when a tree is scarred by a fire, that scar is evidence of fire that year and you can sample old trees or natural snags or old stumps of old trees, you can sample that. And using methods of dendro chronology, you can identify fire scars and then date those scars by the use of the tree rings.
And there's a lot of information we can glean from those types of studies that informs our modern day management of forest and fire and determining the role of fire, the need of fire in our forest management. For example, the first thing we get when we do a fire history based on tree ring dating is the frequency of fire.
And some of our tree ring fire histories, we've been able to get back to the early 14 hundreds and that gives us about a 600 year history of fire with an annual or less than annual resolution of dating the occurrence of fires and forest. And so what we have found is that fires, depending on where you're at, they may have burned every one to three years or every three to five years or every five to 10 years.
You know, it varies with where you're at in the country and generally the fire frequency decreases the further north you go where the climate becomes more cold or the fire season is not as long or you have more precipitation. All those things act to reduce the fire frequency. And we know that most of the fires were dormancy and fires. We know how frequent they were. We kind of know how intense they were from how many of the steady trees have a scar in any given fire year.
So many of our fire years are recorded by a scar on one tree out of 30 or 50 some years. We find that 50 or 75% of the trees have a scar in the same year. So we assume that was a more intense fire to scar so many trees. The same event. When you get a network of these fire history sites, you can start getting an idea of how much fire burned on the landscape. It may have been one big fire or it may have been a bunch of fires burning in the same year, but you can get an idea.
And in the past you can imagine when a fire starts, if humans weren't around to put it out and only mother nature put it out, it could burn over millions of acres before that happened and it could die down and then it could dry out again and it can reemerge and and make another run at it. My story with fire began in the beginning of my forestry education and we were taught fire is bad and it doesn't belong in the woods and our mission is to put it out.
My first forestry job was in southeast Alaska on the Tonga National Forest where it rains 160 inches a year. So there wasn't much place for any kind of fire in that environment. But then I moved to Idaho on the Nez per national forest and there my involvement with fire was putting it out and after the wildfire season was over, then we would do prescribed burning in our harvesting units to reduce the fuel hazard generated by those activities.
So it was a bit of prescribed burning and a lot of fire suppression. And so, you know, a lot of my career was putting fires out and finding other ways of managing the forest without fire. But over time, along with everyone else, you start realizing we're creating a lot of problems by excluding fire from many of our ecosystems that are adapted and in fact need fire to exist. And the type of research I do is called civi culture.
It's managing the vegetation, kinda like forest gardening and it's driven by management objectives. What are you trying to do with the forest? And then you consider, well where is it at now? And given the biology and the ecology of the species, what do I need to do from management standpoint to move it to some desired condition? And more and more I was finding that I need fire to get what I want done.
And even though there are some management practices that can get some of what fire does, there's no a hundred percent substitute for fire when you're talking about managing the ecosystem and having a functioning ecosystem. And then I started working with the endocrinologist to understand fire history and put that together with my knowledge of ecology and management.
Spent 30 years doing that and what we know from the work is that the vegetation on the landscape was a lot more diverse and more of a mosaic than what it is today. Today we have agriculture urban areas and mature closed canopy forest and that's kind of a low diverse, low resilient landscape. It's very vulnerable to outbreaks of insects or disease. And when they do, it's not confined to a small area, it covers hundreds of thousands or millions of acres.
They, along with other changes in our forest and our climate, in our land use, are fueling this catastrophic wildfire crisis that we have now, which primarily plays itself out west, but it certainly occurs in the east. For example, in 2016 there was a Gatlinburg complex of fires and while it only burned 17,000 acres, it killed I think like 15 people and caused over $2 billion in damages. So the east is not without its wildfire threats either.
And one way to combat that in the long term is to promote fire adapted ecosystems and to diversify the landscape with a, a variety of grasslands and savannahs and woodlands as well as forest. With the use of prescribed fire, We've learned pretty quickly that it's not just prescribed fire alone that's going to turn everything around to the positive because vegetation is so outta whack, it's usually unsuccessful to just apply fire to restore these fire dependent systems.
In many cases the trees have gotten bigger, they have thicker bark and they can resist our low intensity dormant and prescribed fires. And even what we call fire sensitive trees are able to resist being affected by our prescribed fires. And so you need to combine prescribed fire with timber harvesting or with mechanical or chemical thinning of the forest with other practices to, especially in the early stages of restoring these more open forest ecosystems.
And so I've been a part of research with other people like Mike Saunders and Joe Marshall and Jan Beck who have looked at the effect of prescribed fire on valuable hardwood species in the east. And what we're finding is that there is some loss, but it might be two to 10% of the volume or the value depending on the species.
Now fire's not the answer to everything and in some cases, depending on your landowner objectives, you may not want it, but it's not to be feared and it can be managed, you know, to minimize the negative impacts. And it, it takes more than restoration of 20 acres to affect fire risk on a landscape or to conserve native species on a landscape or to recover the habitat for a threatened and endangered species and have it in large enough patches and to be connected as it needs to be for the species.
Those are big landscape scale issues and they often involve multiple ownerships committing themselves and working together to restore those landscapes. Sometimes people say We can't go backwards, why do you keep talking about restoring some historic condition? You know, things are different now we need to think about the future.
And that's true, but what's really, I think, curious oddity is that the past is actually a desired condition for the future or points towards solutions for the futures because the past, as I've been talking about, has been one of a more diverse disturbance regime and therefore a diverse ecosystems across the landscapes and the species, at least from a tree standpoint, the species that dominated a lot of those more open systems were the oaks and the pines.
And those species are in general considered to be more adaptive and compatible with expected future climates. So favoring more open forest like savannas and woodlands dominated by oaks and pines for trees that are adapted to frequent fire really addresses a lot of the future threats of climate change. Wildfire crisis conservation of native biodiversity, wildlife habitat, and threatening endangered species recovery.
It's really a plus for us and for management that so many of these objectives are compatible with one another in restoring frequent fire ecosystems. You know, the thing about fire in ecosystems is it's not an event, it's a part of the system. And if you exclude a frequent fire for 50 or 70 years and you come in with one little wimpy spring fire, you're not gonna turn things around with that one fire.
And in fact, as I mentioned earlier, the trees get so big that they're not really affected by low intensity dormant and fires. You know, we have studies where we've been burning like that for 60 years and, and the overstory is still intact. Now the understory in the mid story of trees has been affected and greatly reduced if you're burning every year for 60 years. But the overstory is still intact.
And so it's understanding that fire is part of the system and needs to be there for the long haul to really, you know, get at the types of ecosystems that, you know, we're trying to restore. And the other thing is forest management is really complex because you know, you have some, a species like white oak, well it goes from, you know, North Carolina up to Canada.
And so they're growing over all kinds of topography and soil and climates and they're growing in different mixtures with competing species that all have advantages or not over, you know, your oak or your pine. And so the, the environment is changing, the climate's changing, the soils are changing and you come in and you do one management treatment on it and you get a response and maybe it's good. So you write an article and say, hey, success. And then somebody goes, oh okay, I'll try that.
And they try it in their area and it doesn't work. The results are inconsistent and it's working in a complex ecosystem and world and you're pulling one string with one of your management treatments and you can get any number of results depending on where you're at and what the starting conditions were. Or if you have a high deer browsing population, you know, like anything like that can like really alter the trajectory of the forest.
And then you add fire in there, which is another complex creature and it's driven by the fuels, the topography, the climate, the weather or how you ignite it. It's so complex. The results are so hard to interpret in a way that you can consistently recreate them and make recommendations from based on one area to other areas.
And that just takes a, a lot of work and a coordinated scientific approach to take into account all of these major drivers of forest and fire and then put 'em together to where the result is somewhat predictable. But science will never be enough and it will never be happen quick enough to provide all the answers.
And so the real scientists are the managers and landowners who are willing to try different things and do it in a way maybe in consultation with some scientists and with the use of monitoring you can then, you know, do some adaptive management and change practices if you see something going off course and you'll learn in the process. So we're getting better at that. There's always room to grow and improve in science to serve management.
Fire is bringing us together in our management on public and private lands and with the help of everybody, we have a common mission through fighting the destructive wildfires but also using fire in a good way. And it is gonna take active management, it won't happen on its own.
And in one instance I'm proud of the agency for being able to change and face the fact that well maybe for a hundred years our policies and our management have created some problems or not been the best, we did the best at the time, but we know differently now and we're trying to change. And change is slow. There's a lot of major challenges with this in a country that's owned by, especially in the east private landowner.
And to deal with a management challenge that's as big as this one is, there's not enough taxpayer dollars to do what needs to be done. And a lot of what needs to be done requires treating, removing what is currently unmerchantable material. And so it costs money right now to treat it.
And so we're challenged to find new forest products and innovative new markets for forest products that will turn this cost of treatment into a profit, at least to break even proposition for the public or private landowner. Something like that is sorely needed to help us to operate on the scale that we need to operate on.
But there are a lot of improvements in signs of positive change in terms of different stewardship agreements or good neighbor authorities and working together with other agencies like we'd never have before. So there's just a, a lot of things, policy legislatively that are coming together to, you know, enhance the public's awareness and ability and willingness to put fire on the ground and be a part of it. - That about wraps up part one of a fire.
But before we go, there was one more thing that could be seen through Dan's fire histories. - We relate the occurrence of fires with climate and we can relate the occurrence of fires with humans. And so we've done a lot of research on that, the relationship between humans and fire regime, the attributes of fire regimes and how that changes with human history.
And we find a very strong correlation in the East with fire occurrence and human occupation and land use, beginning with the Native Americans, the indigenous peoples. They very much used fire to manage the landscape for what they desired and what they needed. And as the Europeans came in, things started changing. European diseases decimated native populations. And so some areas were unoccupied and we see that in the fire record of there being big gaps, fire free gaps.
When something like that would happen in history, the European settlers came in and it disrupted the traditional native ways, their economies, their their normal land use patterns, how they moved around on the landscape, and we can see that in the fire history. - Today's episode covered only about a hundred years of history, nothing, and people have studied and used and practiced fire long before the Forest Service.
Next episode, we'll hear from two Native American Forest Service scientists on their research in their feelings of being the two Native American Forest Service scientists. See you next time. This episode was produced, written and edited by me, John Yales. My editors at the Northern Research Station were Suzanne Flore and Sharon Holla. My editor at the Rocky Mountain Research Station was Jessica Bruin. All the music this episode was by Blue Dot Sessions.
This podcast is produced by the Forest Service, an agency of the US Department of Agriculture, which is an equal opportunity provider, employer and lender. Be sure to follow the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you wanna help the show, head over to Apple Podcasts and leave a review. Thanks for listening and see you next week.