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mongrel
Trad climber
Truckee, CA
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Sep 10, 2013 - 04:45pm PT
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On the more general topic of postfire seeding, the summary note at the url posted above has a few key bits in it that emphasize why, in most respects, you can't just generalize all good or all bad.
The one most consistent finding is that, in the arid West, seeding is almost never effective in controlling erosion of upland areas. This principle holds not only for post-fire, but generally for disturbed soils. You can sometimes get a nice photo-op of a lot of green, but in reality our climates (and there are multiple, even within the arid West) do not support the level of vegetation cover of pioneer species that is necessary to control erosion. You have to achieve that by other means that are impossible and/or prohibitively expensive from the air (there are significant ecological downsides to those fancy expensive sprayed mulches too). Running equipment on recently burned soils is just about the absolute worst possible thing you can do with respect to erosion control.
The summary at firescience.gov makes it clear they're talking about treatments from 1970-2006. It would be a lot more valuable if they subdivided the papers they're summarizing by time period and what was in the seed mixes. It's not very relevant what happens from seeding non-native annual grasses, because that's not what's usually happening nowadays. Then there's an item (and I haven't gone back to the originals, though one would want to) to the effect that, about half of the reported cases of seeding to prevent takeover by weeds, it was effective, and the other half, it wasn't. What I would love to know is, what, if anything that we can discern, differentiates between the sites and treatments where this worked and the ones where it didn't? Even if it was 90 percent ineffective but 10 percent effective, why did those work? That's where the potential progress lies.
For my part, I've seen postfire sites in the Great Basin where seeding didn't do sh!t, and others where it was really beneficial. You really need to burrow into every last detail to learn from this. For example, seeds of some of the shrub species that you might judge to be highly desirable, like sagebrush and rabbitbrush, are really tiny and have very limited period of viability. Everything can be just perfect only if your sagebrush seed is older than it should be, it's a flop. My beef about seizing on failures and successes is lack of these tiny details that make all the difference. Was the sagebrush really the subspecies that it should be for your site? Can you trust that supplier? What did the label tag say about weed content, not just percentage, but species? If you already have cheat grass, well, maybe a half percent of it isn't that big of a deal in some otherwise desirable seed. But in a cheat grass free area, it's zero tolerance. And so on. Details are the whole thing.
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mechrist
Gym climber
South of Heaven
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Sep 10, 2013 - 05:02pm PT
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mongrel, those are good questions... but reveal a bit of idealistic thinking. No way in hell you are going to find a source of native, locally adapted seed that comes anywhere close to covering the areas that would need to be covered for most post-fire restoration. I know some ecologists throughout the west who have collected seed mixes for specific restoration projects (fens, meadows, native plant gardens, etc). It is labor intensive and tricky for many of the reasons you point out (viability with age, weed free, etc). The notion of doing that for post-fire restoration is pretty far fetched... but doing it for my yard works pretty well!!!
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slidingmike
climber
CA
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Sep 10, 2013 - 06:39pm PT
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I can see it now: a new forest of poison oak!
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Kalimon
Social climber
Ridgway, CO
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Sep 10, 2013 - 09:57pm PT
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Ron do you perhaps mean Ceanothus?
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mechrist
Gym climber
South of Heaven
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Sep 10, 2013 - 10:22pm PT
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atch the annuals come in and the herbs and other understory plants.
I don't doubt your plant knowledge Dingus, but how many of the above mentioned weeds can you readily id in the field?
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TGT
Social climber
So Cal
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Sep 10, 2013 - 10:52pm PT
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Ten years after the 2000 Manter Fire.
Domelands 2010
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wilbeer
Mountain climber
honeoye falls,ny.greeneck alleghenys
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Sep 10, 2013 - 10:56pm PT
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DMT is right.
Have you ever been to yellowstone before the fire and then years later too see the rebound .
Truly amazing.
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mongrel
Trad climber
Truckee, CA
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Sep 10, 2013 - 11:57pm PT
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Mechrist, no, the things I mentioned are not idealistic at all, in fact, they are precisely what I do for all seedings I've specified or otherwise collaborated on, and other people I know do it too. The whole cycle, from contracting for collection, through storage, choosing supplemental species from the supplier's stocks by reviewing the provenance and full label data (germination rates, date of collection, weed percentage and composition). This is exactly what you do in order to do good revegetation, and I'm nowhere near the only person who does it this way. So, it's not true that paying attention to those details is idealistic. The seed suppliers have all this data in their computers, you just ask, and they e-mail it right over.
You leaped ahead to a totally different topic, namely, native seed and how much of it one can get. There, I totally agree with you: it's impossible to come up with adequate quantities for revegetating these enormous fires in the sagebrush or in conifer forest, and it's why I think generally aerial seeding isn't a practical, effective technique. But maybe some in specific instances it is, and for those we ought to advance the science of how to get them to be maximally effective.
Then there's the point about locally adapted seed. I personally think a lot of the concern about this is overblown. In special cases, like maybe Tahoe, I can see there might possibly be a point, but for species that range all the way north and south in the Sierra, for example, there's probably so much gene flow that the idea of local adaptation is pretty speculative. I'd prefer not to source, say, ponderosa pine from the Rockies to use in California, but from just about anywhere in California it'll be good enough. In the Great Basin, the degree of local adaption of, say, big sagebrush, is probably pretty limited. Seed from anywhere in Nevada will be fine anywhere else in that state. Stuff from eastern Idaho, not so sure, the climate truly is pretty different there.
Actually, for long-lived species like trees, it's probably preferable to revegetate with a mixture of different genotypes as Ron suggests, just in case there's one or another ecological change that's hard on one of your source genotypes. I just don't think area-specific needs to be all that narrow of an area.
Collecting seed specifically for postfire restoration is difficult to infeasible for exactly the reasons everyone has mentioned. But it's predictable that there will be a few hundred thousand acres of burns every year, it WOULD be technically feasible to regularly collect (or produce in seed farms) stuff they we know we'll use almost every year. But that's truly idealistic: agency resource folks get battered from all sides if they try to take forward-thinking actions.
And don't get me started on the waste of many many millions on expensive mulches sprayed from the air, like they do in LA....
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mechrist
Gym climber
South of Heaven
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Sep 11, 2013 - 12:09am PT
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Sorry mongrel, I thought you mentioned native seeds. I don't envy the work you do... honestly, I hate plant id and latin.
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Chaz
Trad climber
greater Boss Angeles area
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Sep 11, 2013 - 11:55am PT
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The next step is to close all the climbing areas. See "Station Fire" for the blueprint.
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mongrel
Trad climber
Truckee, CA
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Sep 11, 2013 - 04:34pm PT
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There certainly are quite a few examples of non-recovery of original vegetation after fires. We have one right in Truckee, some 40 years old, that's still mostly ceanothus and hasn't succeeded back into conifers. But there are counter-examples too - including some that are also right in Truckee, where Jeffrey pine grew back with or without planting. Why they differ, I don't think anyone has really tried to answer. But there are other factors that may be important elsewhere, specifically that the end of the Little Ice Age (cooler, more mesic conditions in montane regions) was roughly 1850. That's the climatic regime that prevailed when the Comstock-logged forest got established. So some marginal areas were probably due to gradually convert to P-J with or without logging or fire. Plus, there was a lot of livestock grazing which is a factor (regardless of what plants they're eating). It's not at all simple, and I agree with Ron that some of these places are not likely to support vigorous pine forest ever again, even if planted. Well, maybe pinyon.
The cheat grass that has taken over millions of acres is a real issue, regardless of the combination of causes (not just fire). In the Tahoe area, plenty of formerly cheat grass free areas are now infested due to use of fertilizer and compost in restoration projects, so the very category of actions that are represented as being beneficial is doing a lot of harm depending on how it's done. It's a huge problem and there isn't an easy answer that I know of.
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klk
Trad climber
cali
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Sep 19, 2013 - 02:43pm PT
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baer's preliminary report on on previously fire-treated areas (fuel breaks, prescribed burns areas, mechanical thinning) suggests that treated areas tended to burn far less severely.
a few, like the pine mt break and the stuff at grower's, made it easier for fighters to occupy and hold that ground and save stuff.
way too early for more than impressionistic reports. but the map is useful for showing previous areas of treatment--
http://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb5436551.pdf
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klk
Trad climber
cali
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Sep 19, 2013 - 03:02pm PT
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the grim thing is that we have a good picture of the spot with the worst burn intensitites, and it's right up the clavey.
compare the two maps from the baer team. the first shows preliminary assessment of burn intensity:
http://www.inciweb.org/incident/maps/3726/
the second, linked in my other post, shows ares of previous firet treatment (prescribed burns, mechanical thinning, wildland fire).
the maps both center on the clavey. there isn't easy access to that part of the drainage, it's steep and rough, and the rains are coming. much of it is in what seems like the lower part of the pine range these days. even if they get enough seed and teams, and even if the soil isnt sterilized, i see very little hope that this isn't going to be really, really f*#ked up.
one of my favorite spots in the frickin country. prolly the last indigenous trout in the sierra.
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klk
Trad climber
cali
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Sep 19, 2013 - 06:14pm PT
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the climate HAS CHANGED. Fire doesn't prevent the regrets of a forest, climate change certainly can however. Dome lands? The climate has changed in the last 10,000 years, markedly so. Same for the basin and range, same for the. Clavey canyon bottom lands. Manzanita may replace ponderosa, ponderosa may replace firs.... Weeds may replace manzanita, quine sabe?
indeed, and as mongrel pointed out above, much of what just got roasted was a remnant of the little ice age, which is why we're going to see oak scrub and manzanita and poison oak replace a lot of the pine forest. in geological time, it doesn't mean much at all. i'll be gone before the entire sierra is given over to poison oak and cockroaches, the two species that seem happiest in a high c02 climate.
but i'd like to have been gone before the clavey went. if we'd had the dough for regular mechanical thinning and occasional control burns, maybe we could've held off the poison oak a little longer. more to the point, maybe we could've held off on the uncontrolled experiment in learning whether or not a stand-clearing fire in that drainage would create the conditions to wipe out the clavey rainbow and the rest of the native fish.
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mechrist
Gym climber
South of Heaven
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Sep 20, 2013 - 11:02am PT
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And "we can't predict the future with absolute certainty, therefore any action to reduce our carbon emissions is part of a vast government conspiracy"... no need for those who created the imbalance to take ANY action to reduce CO2 emissions, so sayeth He Who Stuffs Animals and understands nothing about atmospheric science.
edit: fixed it... although we can never be too sure what you actually wrote, what with all the mysterious disappearing posts and all
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Captain...or Skully
climber
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Sep 27, 2013 - 02:05am PT
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Life is rooted in Death and Death in Life. They need each other.
Assist this process as you see fit. It's already begun, you know.....
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klk
Trad climber
cali
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the baer specialist reports are out.
usfs turned the approval around within a matter of days, presumably to beat the shutdown. my guess is that some portion of the rehab has been designated "essential," given the obvious dangers of erosion and flooding if the workd isnt done before the big storms. but i don't know enough detail to really comment.
haven't had a chance to read the reports yet.
http://www.inciweb.org/incident/article/3726/21596/
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klk
Trad climber
cali
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Oct 15, 2013 - 03:12pm PT
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some of the baer work got funded in time to continue, but a bunch of folks have been pulled off due to the shutdown.
one bit of possible good news-- i heard, 2ndhand, from somone who had been with the soils team in the clavey drainage, that the soils they tested there are still absorbing water. the fire there seems to have been a heavy crown fire, so the soil didn't get fried the way it did in other areas. that would be great news, if it's true. i don't know anyone on the baer team, so can't confirm. if anyone here knows more, fill us in.
and the current baer update is out at inciweb.
http://www.inciweb.org/incident/article/3726/21607/
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