Fire, other ravages jeopardize California’s prized forests

Changing Forest Landscape

On a steep mountainside where walls of flames torched the forest on their way toward Lake Tahoe in 2021, blackened trees stand in silhouette against a gray sky.

“If you can find a live tree, point to it,” Hugh Safford, an environmental science and policy researcher at the University of California, Davis, said touring damage from the Caldor Fire, one of the past decade’s many massive blazes.

Dead pines, firs, and cedars stretch as far as the eye can see. Fire burned so hot that soil was still barren in places more than a year later. Granite boulders were charred and flaked from the inferno. Long, narrow indentations marked the graves of fallen logs that vanished in smoke.

Damage in this area of Eldorado National Forest could be permanent — part of a troubling pattern that threatens a defining characteristic of the Sierra Nevada range John Muir once called a “waving sea of evergreens.”

Forest like this is disappearing as increasingly intense fires alter landscapes around the planet, threatening wildlife, jeopardizing efforts to capture climate-warming carbon and harming water supplies, according to scientific studies.

A combination of factors is to blame in the U.S. West: A century of firefighting, elimination of Indigenous burning, logging of large fire-resistant trees, and other management practices that allowed small trees, undergrowth and deadwood to choke forests.

Drought has killed hundreds of millions of conifers or made them susceptible to disease and pests, and more likely to go up in flames. And a changing climate has brought more intense, larger and less predictable fires.

“What’s it’s coming down to is jungles of fuels in forest lands,” Safford said. “You get a big head of steam going behind the fire there, it can burn forever and ever and ever.”

Despite relatively mild wildfire seasons the past two years, California has seen 12 of its largest 20 wildfires — including the top eight — and 13 of the most destructive in the previous five years. Record rain and snowfall this year mostly ended a three-year drought but explosive vegetation growth could feed future fires.

California has lost more than 1,760 square miles (4,560 square kilometers) — nearly 7% — of its tree cover since 1985, a recent study found. While forest increased in the 1990s, it declined rapidly after 2000 because of larger and more frequent fires, according to the study in the American Geophysical Union Advances journal.

A study of the southern Sierra Nevada — home to Yosemite, Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks — found nearly a third of conifer forest had transitioned to other vegetation as a result of fire, drought or bark beetles in the past decade.

“We’re losing them at a rate that is something that we can’t sustain,” said Brandon Collins, co-author of that report in the journal Ecological Applications and adjunct forestry professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “If you play it out (over) the next 20 to 30 years at the same rate, it would be gone.”

Some environmentalists, like Chad Hanson of the John Muir Project sponsored by the nonprofit Earth Island Institute, said there’s a “myth of catastrophic wildfire” to support logging efforts — and he has often sued to block plans to remove dead trees or thin forests.

Hanson said seedlings are rising from the ashes in high-severity patches of fire and the dead wood provides habitat for imperiled spotted owls, Pacific fishers and rare woodpeckers.

His research found forests always had dense patches of trees and some severe fires, Hanson said, contending that increasingly large ones result from weather and climate change, made worse by logging practices.

“If everything people are hearing was true there would be a lot more reason for concern,” he said. “But the public is being gaslighted.”

However, others are concerned failure to properly manage forests can result in intense fire that could harm wildlife habitat, the ability to store climate-warming carbon in trees and the quality of Sierra snowmelt that provides about 60% of the water for farms and cities.

Burn scars are more prone to flooding and erosion, and runoff becomes tainted with ash and sediment.

“Areas where mixed conifer burned at high severity, those are all areas that are vulnerable to total forest loss,” said Christy Brigham, chief of resources management and science at Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks. “We have no idea what that means for wildlife habitat, for water cycling, for carbon storage. And that’s not even getting into the things we love about forests.”

After wildfires in 2020 and 2021 wiped out up to about a fifth of all giant sequoias — once considered almost fireproof — the National Park Service last week embarked on a controversial project to help the mighty trees recover with its largest planting of seedlings a single grove.

Tools for Treating Forests

To tackle the problem of huge wildfires, the federal government, which owns nearly 60% of California’s 51,560 square miles (134,00 square kilometers) of forest, agreed with the state in 2020 to jointly reduce fuels on 1,560 square miles (4,040 square kilometers) a year by 2025.

While a fraction of the land needing treatment, it’s considered a promising development after years of inaction, though not without controversy.

Fire scientists advocate more deliberate burning at low-to-moderate severity to clear vegetation that makes forests susceptible to big fires.

But the Forest Service has historically been risk averse, said Safford, the agency’s regional ecologist for two decades before retiring in 2021. Rather than chance that a fire could blow up, officials have generally snuffed flames before they could deliver benefits of lower-intensity fire.

Weeks before the Caldor Fire, the Forest Service had been monitoring a lightning fire south of Lake Tahoe, while dealing with more pressing ones. But when the small fire took off, causing millions of dollars in damage, politicians blasted the agency for not doing more. Officials quickly said they would no longer let some naturally ignited fires burn that season.

With more than $4 billion in funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act, the Forest Service plans to ramp up forest thinning in places where the wildfire threat to communities and infrastructure is most immediate.

That will include cutting smaller trees, as well as setting intentional fires to clear accumulated forest litter.

Battlelines Over Thinning

Last fall when Safford led two graduate students up a rutted fire road through charred forest, they came upon a patch of life where large pines and cedars towered overhead

SDGs, Targets, and Indicators

1. Which SDGs are addressed or connected to the issues highlighted in the article?

• SDG 13: Climate Action
• SDG 15: Life on Land
• SDG 6: Clean Water and Sanitation

2. What specific targets under those SDGs can be identified based on the article’s content?

• SDG 13.1: Strengthen resilience and adaptive capacity to climate-related hazards and natural disasters.
• SDG 15.1: Ensure the conservation, restoration, and sustainable use of terrestrial and inland freshwater ecosystems and their services.
• SDG 6.6: Protect and restore water-related ecosystems, including mountains, forests, wetlands, rivers, aquifers, and lakes.

3. Are there any indicators mentioned or implied in the article that can be used to measure progress towards the identified targets?

No specific indicators are mentioned in the article. However, indicators related to forest cover, wildfire frequency and severity, ecosystem health, and water quality could be used to measure progress towards the identified targets.

Table: SDGs, Targets, and Indicators

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Source: abcnews.go.com

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