Sacramento, Calif. (AP) — Firefighters and many studies are evaluating intensive thinning projects to save communities that have recently been threatened near Lake Tahoe, California and Nevada. Opposition from some environmental advocacy groups is making noise in the scientific community.
Every year, the states and federal governments of the western United States thin thousands of acres of dense timber and carve wide strips into forests near remote communities. All of these are designed to slow the spread of large wildfires.
The project aims to restore overgrown forests to their pre-century state before land managers begin to reflexively extinguish all wildfires as soon as possible.
Current efforts include using fire to fight fire, deliberately setting fire in a cooler box, rainy months to burn dangerous fuels, or flashbacks on the path of eroding wildfires. Includes setting. Forest managers have acknowledged such burns by helping to protect the huge forests of Sequoia National Park.
Most scientific studies acknowledge that such forest management is a valuable tool, but environmental advocates say that data from recent wildfires has spread their efforts to delay wildfires instead. He says he supports their long-standing claim of acceleration.
The debate has already fueled a passionate debate.
It led to a surge in citations for dueling scientific research, giving competing claims that science may be distorted by idealism.
The debate has emerged over this year’s giant Bootleg Fire in southern Oregon.
“Recent tens of thousands of acres of thinning, fuel destruction, and other forest management have not only failed to stop or delay the rapid spread of fires … Fires are often the fastest in such areas. “We have moved,” said the California-based Los Padres Forest Watch nonprofit in an analysis involving the John Muir Project and Wild Heritage Advocates.
James Johnston, a researcher at Oregon State University’s College of Forestry, called the group’s conclusions “quite misleading,” “irresponsible,” and “self-contradictory.”
“The claim that modern fuel-cutting thinning exacerbates fires is unreliable,” Johnston said.
The debate focused on a project in which the Klamath and nature reserves spent 10 years thinning small trees and using planned fire.
They and the U.S. Forest Office said the treatment slowed the spread of the fire and weakened its strength, while critics said the flames ran the fastest north in the same area, five miles in about 13 hours (8). Kilometers) said it spread.
Scientists say climate change makes the western United States much warmer and drier, makes the weather more extreme, makes wildfires more frequent and destructive, and accelerates the need for larger-scale forest treatment.
Critics say that thinning work essentially records a disguised project.
Chad Hanson, a forest and fire ecologist at the John Muir Project, said that by opening canopies and increasing the distance between trees, the natural humidity of jungles and the shade of air conditioning are reduced, and unhindered winds burn faster. Allows you to press.
Such reasoning violates the laws of physics, other experts said: low fuel means less fire. Fewer trees means that it is more difficult for the fire to jump from the top of the tree to the top of the tree.
Critics claim that the recent large wildfires in California also swiftly passed through thinned areas that couldn’t protect the community.
Timothy Ingalsby, a former federal firefighter who heads the safety, ethics and ecology of the Oregon-based Firefighters Union, said this year’s giant Dixie Fire sparked across the containment line and thinned near Paradise. He said he lit the dry branches left by the work. The town was almost destroyed in 2018 by the most deadly and most devastating wildfires of our time.
Critics have missed the point, said Tom Porter, head of the California Fire Department.
“The problem is that if you have a headfire that’s a mile or a few miles wide and it’s going through the lumber like grass, there’s no fuel there to stop it,” Porter said.
John Bailey, a professor of forestry and fire management at Oregon State University, said each side could point out many competing examples. Some thinnings were certainly mistreated, but “wherever effective fuel treatment was done, they corrected fire behavior and reduced intensity.”
The contrasting views were controversial. One treatise suggests that spotted owl habitat proponents, including Hanson of the John Muir project, “selectively use data to support their agenda.” Another treatise said such dissenting could “promote confusion” and delay the author’s claim of necessary forest treatment.
Hanson dismissed the criticism of “character assassination” caused by those who are benefiting from logging and who are reluctant to accept what he claims to be an evolving science.
“On average, thinned areas tend to burn faster and more violently, because everything is the same,” he said, 30 of the 1,500 fires that took place in the western United States. Cited his own work, including an extensive 2016 review of the year. We are working with the Arizona-based Biodiversity Center and the Oregon-based Geos Institute.
Professor Erica Freishmann of the Department of Global and Marine Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University said the department “reflects both evidence and comprehensible emotions” when wildfires destroy homes and ecosystem treasures.
Competing debates are part of legitimate policy and scientific debates, according to Char Miller, a professor of environmental analysis at Pomona College in California, who wrote extensively about wildfires, including Hanson.
Forest managers give examples of how a 400-foot (120-meter) wide fuel firebreak helped protect rural homes in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
The US Forestry Department produced a video called “Fuel Processing Work-The Success Story of a Creek Fire,” which CalFire covered in its Fuel Reduction Guide.
John Battles, a professor of forest ecology at the University of California, Berkeley, said:
The impact of thinning on wildfires creates divisions | WGN Radio 720
Source link The impact of thinning on wildfires creates divisions | WGN Radio 720
The post The impact of thinning on wildfires creates divisions | WGN Radio 720 appeared first on Illinois News Today.
No comments:
Post a Comment