Ecopolitology: Big fire in beetle-wrecked forest. But are dead trees more flammable, really?
Ecopolitology is an environmentally-oriented new media outlet in Fort Collins, Colorado (see its ‘about’ ). From the looks of one example it is providing old-fashioned journalism – nimble and multiply sourced and with a timely hook. The story is by Timothy B. Hurst, its editor and founder. It is about a big fire burning through a pine beetle-blasted lodgepole forest and a new report that addresses what seems a dumb question: Are forests full of dead, red-needled and crackly dry conifers any more likely to go up in flames than nice green ones?
Answer: looks like no.
I went looking for coverage of this news deliberately. A few days ago NASA’s Goddard Space Center put out a press release – linked in Grist below – with an eye-opening spot of news. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin teamed up with NASA LandSat imagery analysts to figure out whether western forests hit hard by beetles are any more likely to host wildfires than are green and presumably healthy tracts? Teams from the National Park Service and elsewhere helped get ground truth, calibrating the LandSat data. Result: hold that beetle-killed “tinderbox” talk. Dead forests, the researchers surmise now that the data make them think about it harder, drop needles fast and their flammable oils degrade.
Such effects seem to mean that dead stands of trees don’t support crown fires any better than live ones. Not worse, either, maybe, but the data say don’t blame the dead trees for the recent upsurges in wildfires (blaming them both, however, on warming climate is a good bet, the scientists say).
It is surprising that few outlets – I can’t find any others in mainstream media – covered this example of a scientific question that seems obvious until one does a study and gets an unexpected answer. Not only did NASA send it about directly, but it circulated on EurekAlert!. It is so counter-intuitive it merits wider attention.
Hurst took the NASA report, knitted it into news on the Fourmile Fire near Boulder, and got himself a story.
By the way, I mentioned this story and study to Mrs. Tracker this morning. She exclaimed of course there aren’t so many fires in those dead trees – who would want to go camping there? Hmmm. So, having not read the formal report, one does wonder if they considered the percentage of wildfires set by careless or pyromaniacal people and, if it’s significant, corrected for the different number of visitors to dead versus live forests.
Grist for the Mill: NASA-Goddard Press Release (text and well-done, embedded video) ;
- Charlie Petit
September 11th, 2010 at 1:17 pm
Hmm, they must have sent me that press release, but it never registered, because, living in Oregon dead-tree country, I’d have jumped on it. (Might not have sold a story, but I’d have tried.) I’m guessing the hed got it buried. I can’t begin to count the number of press releases I’ve gotten touting a “Surprising connection” or the like that is old news, or totally unsurprising news. In retrospect, it needed to say “no connection.”