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Big Basin is recovering, but it is a long way from recovery. If there aren't any fires as severe as the CZU fire for many years it will recover. But if intense
by not2b 3y ago
Big Basin is recovering, but it is a long way from recovery. If there aren't any fires as severe as the CZU fire for many years it will recover. But if intense fires become more frequent, that's far less clear. The regrowth you see in Big Basin, as described in the article, appears to have been fueled by sugar reserves in the old growth trees. Can they sustain that if they get hit again and again?
We have "just cycles" if the climate, on average, is fairly steady. But if there's a hotter/dryer trend, the areas that can sustain redwoods will drift north, and this might be difficult for very long-lived trees to keep up with.
- rad_gruchalski 3y ago300m years ago we had Pangea. I wait for that to recover.
- Y_Y 3y agoI'm holding out for the cycle of planet formation to repeat
- rad_gruchalski 3y agoSo Long Earth, Thanks for the Air and Whatnot.
- blindriver 3y ago> Big Basin is recovering, but it is a long way from recovery. Define recovery. Do you mean recovery to the point that your Instagram pictures are as beautiful as before? Or do you mean that life is thriving and the forest is in its rebuilding phase? > If there aren't any fires as severe as the CZU fire How on earth can you get severe fires when the forests don't have as much fuel as they did before? The entire cycle is self-limiting. > Can they sustain that if they get hit again and again? Yes.
- shawndrost 3y agoI don't have a stake in the broader fight, but note that severe fires often leave extra fuel in their wake. (It is a surprising fact, to me at least.) This is because 1) live tree trunks don't burn in severe fires, they leave behind dead trunks (which do burn next time) and 2) the ground cover that comes up will be more massive than the ground cover that used to be there.
- pvaldes 3y ago>> Can they sustain that if they get hit again and again? > Yes Let me fix that for you. The correct answer is not. A "severe" fire is any wildfire causing severe consequences. A small bonfire that would kill the last 20 specimens extant of a wild flower would be severe, for sure. Those small controlled fires will kill all the trees in the cohort 2-8 years old. Do it each five years and is "forest assassination". Dozens of species will quit the area because soil can not hold water anymore. There is not such thing as a free lunch.
- not2b 3y agoI've been hiking in Big Basin for about 30 years now, and have been there since the fire. To use your language "the forest in its rebuilding phase" but it will take a long time. The CZU damage was on a whole other scale from other burned forests I've hiked in that have recovered much more quickly.
- mistrial9 3y agothe technical term missing here is "catastrophic" .. it differentiates between ordinary and extra-ordinary damage