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Not just about safety but also intensity. Super-hot fires sterilize the soil, and total-destruction fires destabilize hillsides & dramatically change microclima
by ip26 5y ago
Not just about safety but also intensity. Super-hot fires sterilize the soil, and total-destruction fires destabilize hillsides & dramatically change microclimate (no shade -> hot & dry). Both can delay recolonization decades or centuries.
- mandelbrotwurst 5y agoWhat is recolonization in this context? Does it just mean growth of a new forest?
- throaway3141593 5y agoPerhaps a new forest, but plants in general (current conditions may favor grassland, or something else). It's "re" because there was an ecosystem there before, and now it's returning. Contrast with, say, a brand new island that is the result of volcanic action. Then it'd be just plain old colonization by way of wind-blown seeds, or seeds that survived a bird's digestive tract.
- masklinn 5y agoWell yes and no. If the soil's been sterilised the entire thing needs to be rebuilt from the grasses upwards, forests don't spring up out of nowhere they build up from precursors.
- mandelbrotwurst 5y agoThanks, I was imagining the smaller stuff as being part of the forest but I suppose maybe the plants that arise first don’t necessarily stick around for the entirety of the forest lifecycle?
- masklinn 5y agoExactly. I don’t remember the exact cycle but basically you first get grass type colonisers, then you might get shrubs, then possibly trees densifying to a forest. Even the tree presence would change as the forest builds up as some essences don’t like being crowded (so won’t replace themselves once the forest densifies) while others prefer shade (so won’t appear until there’s a canopy proper).
- rleigh 5y agoIt is called "secondary succession" (primary being colonisation from scratch on bare rock)
- zz865 5y agoPresumably in the meantime its also vulnerable to landslides and then coverage by invasive species of plants.
- plant-ian 5y agoAlso frequency. Burning the same area too often will destroy seed banks because the plants cannot reach seed maturity fast enough to rebuild the bank.
- jimmygrapes 5y agoYou didn't actually present this take so I take responsibility for how I interpreted it, but... Why does it seem like this is presented as a bad take? What's wrong with ecological changes and corrections taking centuries, or longer? Too often I see environmental advocates wringing their hands over changes which absent humanity would be just a chance for other subsystems to adapt or related ecology to evolve while the initial system rebuilds itself. Just because humanity "depends" upon the later results or effects of these processes (or just because humanity caused them) doesn't mean any anything, really. Consider from the environment's perspective: This, too, shall pass.
- twinkletwinkle_ 5y agoThe rate of change. There's a climate science "gotcha" which is that the Earth's average temperature has been much higher in the past than it is now. No one disputes this. The problem is not so much the absolute level as the rate of change, which gives less time for everything to adapt.
- jimmygrapes 5y agoThank you, this gives me some perspective regarding humanity's effect. I won't claim to understand it all, or agree/disagree with it, but it definitely helps me account for scale.
- salt-thrower 5y agoBingo. Rapid temperature changes of only a few degrees can become mass extinction events. Of course, the natural world has eventually recovered from every mass extinction - but it can take millions of years to get back to the same level of biodiversity as before the extinction.
- tshaddox 5y agoAnd also who is profiting from causing these changes which harm other people.
- tshaddox 5y agoPerhaps some people dislike the fact that in many cases these quaint "ecological changes and corrections" that "would be just a chance for other subsystems to adapt or related ecology to evolve" also just so happen to be cases of a very small group of people profiting immensely from the inconvenience, suffering, and death of very large groups of people. Hearing that very small group of people (or researchers and political advocates funded by that very small group of people) paint a quaint picture of humans as one tiny part of Gaia might make some people uncomfortable.