Forest in California may be disappearing. Scientists say repeated fires, drought and beetle infestations are altering the Sierra Nevada. Despite relatively mild wildfire seasons this year and last, California has seen 12 of its largest 20 wildfires — including the top eight — in the previous five years.
Hugh Safford, an environmental science and policy researcher at the University of California, Davis, is silhouetted as he examines damage from the 2021 Caldor Fire in Eldorado National Forest, Calif., near Lake Tahoe on Oct. 22, 2022. Scientists say forest is disappearing as increasingly intense fires alter landscapes around the planet, threatening wildlife, jeopardizing efforts to capture climate-warming carbon and harming water supplies.
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. California has lost more than 1,760 square miles — 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
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. 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.Many researchers say the canopy of the Sierra Nevada has changed dramatically since heavy Gold Rush logging.
That has allowed forests to become four to seven times more densely wooded than they once were, Safford said. While many larger, fire-resilient trees like ponderosa and Jeffrey pines were logged for lumber, smaller trees that are not so fire resistant have thrived. They compete for water and their low branches allow fire to climb into the canopy of taller trees, fueling devastating crown fires.
Along U.S. Highway 50, where the Caldor Fire had continued burning out of control toward Lake Tahoe, Safford parked his SUV and scrambled up a rocky knoll to point out a slope barren of trees. Forest there had been burned in 1981 and was replaced with chaparral. 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.
A coalition of Sierra-based conservation groups wrote congressional leaders in 2021 urging more federal funding for fire resilience. Their letter cited “broad consensus among fire scientists, land managers, firefighters” to increase thinning and prescribed fire. The chance of a deliberate burn escaping its perimeter — as happened last year in New Mexico’s largest fire in state history — remains a big challenge to the strategy.
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