Wildfire management vs. fire suppression benefits forest and watershed.
An unprecedented 40-year experiment in a 40,000-acre valley of Yosemite National Park strongly supports the idea that managing fire, rather than suppressing it, makes wilderness areas more resilient to fire, with the added benefit of increased water availability and resistance to drought.
After a three-year, on-the-ground assessment of the park’s Illilouette Creek basin, University of California, Berkeley researchers concluded that a strategy dating to 1973 of managing wildfires with minimal suppression and almost no preemptive, so-called prescribed burns has created a landscape more resistant to catastrophic fire, with more diverse vegetation and forest structure and increased water storage, mostly in the form of meadows in areas cleared by fires.
"When fire is not suppressed, you get all these benefits: increased stream flow, increased downstream water availability, increased soil moisture, which improves habitat for the plants within the watershed.
The value of forest clearings Wildfire management, as opposed to suppression, comes with major changes in the way the forest looks, Stephens and Thompson said.
Only four areas in the western U.S., including two in California — the Illilouette Creek basin and the Sugarloaf Creek basin — have allowed lightning fires to burn in large areas for decades.
And in recent drought years, when surrounding basins saw more trees die, there was almost no tree mortality in the Illilouette basin.
"Wildfire management vs. fire suppression benefits forest and watershed: Long-term experiment in Yosemite shows managing fires can help make forest more resilient to fire."
Wildfire management vs. fire suppression benefits forest and watershed: Long-term experiment in Yosemite shows managing fires can help make forest more resilient to fire.
"Wildfire management vs. fire suppression benefits forest and watershed: Long-term experiment in Yosemite shows managing fires can help make forest more resilient to fire."