Volcan Mountain Foundation

A Healthy Forest Promotes Fire Resilience

by Jonathan Appelbaum, Volcan Mountain Foundation Board Member, Conservation-Stewardship Commitee Chair and Consulting Conservation Biologist

Have you ever read an article or heard a talk by some expert or experts who spent every breath talking in buzzwords or jargon? Did you finish said article or talk thinking, ‘Thanks for all of that technical language, but what did any of that mean?’ We feel your pain! Some ideas and some concepts are simply too important to our collective well-being to be limited to a few experts who are fluent in these buzzwords.  One of those concepts is fire resilience.

Let me back up and first define a closely-related term. Ecological resilience is defined as the capacity of an ecosystem to absorb repeated disturbances or shocks and adapt to change without fundamentally switching to an alternative stable state.  It’s the bounds within which an ecosystem can tolerate disturbance without passing the point of no return and switching permanently to a different state.  Naturally, fire resilience assumes this ‘disturbance’ to be wildfire.

For the folks who live in fire prone communities like Julian, Descanso, and places like that, fire resilience begins with accepting the reality of fire within the ecosystem while preventing significant losses through carefully planned management of ignition sources and vegetative fuels.  On Volcan Mountain and the other ‘Sky Islands’ of the eastern Peninsular Range mountains here in San Diego County (e.g., Palomar, Cuyamaca, Laguna, etc.) we are particularly interested in montane forest ecosystems.

We are interested because we have so few montane forests and the disproportionate number of plant and wildlife species that depend on these dwindling communities (e.g., California spotted owls). If we lose the remaining montane forests we have here in our local mountains, some of these species could disappear forever.  That’s a long time!  And I hope you’d agree that we would like our children and our children’s children to be able to live in a County with spotted owls, big-coned Douglas fir, mountain kingsnakes, and more.

By now it is clear that our forests are under threat from megafires, climate change, and pests like the gold spotted oak borer (GSOB) and bark beetle.  There isn’t much we can do to immediately end climate change; those shifts will take time and wide-ranging commitment nationally and globally.  But there are measures we can take individually and societally for things like pests (STOP MOVING FIREWOOD!) and wildfire (promoting forest resilience).

Forest resilience, a logical extension of the concept fire resilience, accepts fire as a reality within forest ecosystems and prescribes measures to manage vegetative fuels and ignition sources for the long-term preservation of the forest community.  Again, fire is naturally part of the forest ecosystem.  What isn’t naturally part of the forest ecosystem is the last century plus of fire suppression.

In the pre-settlement era, when fire wasn’t actively suppressed, periodic fires burnt through the forest ecosystem consuming the accumulated fuel materials on the forest floor, keeping the understory open and preventing the development of ‘ladder fuels’ which convey flame upward into the forest canopy.  These fires were described as low-intensity ground fires.

In the modern paradigm of fire suppression, where in all fires are extinguished as quickly as possible and vegetative fuels within the forest understory became artificially dense allowing the development of ladder fuels, the flames can reach the forest canopy resulting in devastating, high intensity, crown fires. The end result of these high intensity fires crown fires is the permanent shift to a new type of ecosystem (for example from forest to grassland or forest to shrubland).  This phenomenon is known as type conversion and the fires themselves are termed stand-replacing because the standing forest is no more.

There is valid criticism of some modern fire prevention practices or their application for all ecosystems. The montane forests on our local mountains have a fundamentally different fire regime than much of the surrounding region.  Most southern Californians know that our expansive shrubland ecosystems (e.g., chaparral and coastal sage scrub) have a fire regime that is largely driven by seasonal Santa Ana winds (referred to as a wind driven fire regime). While these types of fires definitely occurred pre-historically, they weren’t nearly as common before modern times because there were less ignition sources like freeways, electrical transmission lines, and sparks from power tools.

Our mixed conifer and hardwood montane forests however have what is termed a fuel-driven fire regime, where the density of vegetation and accumulation of ladder fuels contributes more to the growth and spread of wildfires which were, throughout time, naturally started by lightning strikes during summer monsoonal storms.  The lack of fire suppression allowed these fires to naturally clear the forest understory without devastating consequences, until we started suppressing them.

Finally, a discussion of fire resilience would be incomplete without introducing the concept of ‘good fire’.  Deliberate introduction of fire has been used as a landscape and resource management tool for millennia.  Native Americans, including the first peoples of San Diego County, used fire to manage the structure and composition of natural communities for their own management goals.  In addition to reducing fuel density and promoting the health of mature, reproductive trees in forest ecosystems, ‘good fire’ was also used to achieve other culturally important objectives like improving conditions for hunting and gathering and subsistence agriculture.  Production of many essential food, fiber, and medicines depended on intentional burning of various landscapes including montane forests and meadows.

Various circumstances restrict the use of fire as a management tool, therefore it falls to land managers like the Volcan Mountain Foundation to perform management practices analogous to the montane forests’ natural ground fire regime. A robust forest resilience project like VMF’s employs dozens of closely-supervised, highly-skilled, and well-trained technicians to selectively remove hazardous fuels while protecting sensitive resources. We know that wildfire will come to our mountains again, will our local forests be ready? At the Volcan Mountain Nature Center, we know ours will be and that all of the species who depend on the forest will be in good shape for decades to come!

For more information, visit volcanmt.org

(Photo of Volcan Fire 2005 by Bob Eisele)