Fires, Climate Change Permanently Altering Western Forests

[hatrack]

GRANTS PASS, Ore. -- High in the rugged Klamath Mountains, an old-growth stand of Brewer spruce, left over from the last mini-Ice Age, was killed when the Biscuit fire burned across 500,000 acres of southwestern Oregon forest two summers ago.

Dominick DellaSala does not expect this stand of Brewer spruce to grow back. The reason: The climate is now warmer and drier than it was 275 years ago when the trees got their start. And fire, the great catalyst for change in the West's forests, has opened the way for something else to move in that better fits the new climate.

"Brewer spruce is an indicator species of the climate change in this region," said DellaSala, a forest ecologist and director of the World Wildlife Fund's Klamath Siskiyou Program. "It's adapted to cool places and infrequent fires. You get away from fog and cool temperatures and it disappears." Across the West, forests are showing signs of a changing climate: bigger and hotter wildfires, hardwoods and brush moving into conifer forests after they burn, more insect infestations, and trees moving into high-altitude meadows once too cold to support them.

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The vegetation components of the models foresee forests moving north in latitude and treelines moving higher on mountains. Junipers expand into sagebrush in eastern Oregon and the Great Basin. Deserts in New Mexico, Arizona and southeastern California turn into grasslands. Conifer forests of the Northwest, particularly the southern fringes, see more oaks and other broadleaf trees. Already, foresters are seeing brush and hardwoods growing back where vast fires in southwestern Oregon in 1987 killed Douglas fir and pine, and subalpine fir moving into high-altitude meadows of grass and wildflowers on mountains on Washington's Olympic Peninsula."

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[Trajan]

1. OUR Beloved Upper Kern River Canyon ....

by Road's End, Brush Creek, Johnsondale and Alder Creek (The Tubs) ... the entire forest was wiped out 24 months ago ...

It is a skeleton now where a body once was ....

After going up there for many years, we cannot recognize the area ...

Yes: it will come back (we hope), but it is simply mindboggling to realize how such devastation can impact a whole region ...