Mountain biking through China Camp State Park a few days ago, I was struck by all of the different signs of change in the forest around me. First, I rode through the area that recently burned along the southeast corner of the park. The air still smells of charcoal and the ground is black, but I know that come winter and spring, new green shoots will burst forth, adding to the mosiac of plants and habitats in the grassland. All along that trail, I saw another sign of change - the seasonal coloring of everyone's favorite plant, poison oak. At least the deepening red of the leaves makes the dreaded plant more visible and easier to avoid.
Further along the trail, I moved out of the warm sun of the oak woodlands and into damp and shaded canyons, dim under the canopies of redwood and bay trees. Here the change was not only marked by the shift in temperature and tree species but also by the amount of Sudden Oak Death mortality visible. Immediately upon entering one such spot, I saw a full tanoak canopy down on the hillside next to the trail, leaves brown and dry. While I had seen plenty of dead and dying coast live oaks along other, earlier parts of the trail, the sense of mortality was somehow greater here.
The overall change that Sudden Oak Death will bring to this forest, and other simliar forests in California and Oregon, is still largely unknown. Over the past decade, we've seen the trees go and mourned their immediate loss - but once those skeletel reminders are gone, will we recognize the changes that have occured in these woods?
Finally, a note on changes on a personal level. Due to the financial constraints currently affecting the state and the UC system, my fellow blogger Nicole Palkovsky will no longer be working on Sudden Oak Death outreach. We wish Nicole the best and look forward to a time we can work with her again. Chris Lee and I will continue to post to this blog on a regular basis and welcome your input as well. That said, I'm off for a couple weeks of vacation, so keep Chris busy with your comments and thoughts in the meantime, and I'll be writing here again in August.
On Friday, I was at the Trinity River in eastern Humboldt County, watching my son splash his way through water as clear as the sky above. One hundred feet upstream, a helicopter repeatedly dipped its bucket into the river, rising up each time to carry its load to one of the fourteen fires that broke out in our county and neighboring counties last week, the results of lightning strikes. As the helicopter passed over our heads, it trailed a stream of water from the bucket, and about three minutes later, it would be raining on us very gently for a minute or two.
This got me thinking, of course, about fire hazard and the toils of keeping cleared, defensible space around one's home when one lives in the country (which I do not). This in turn evoked thoughts of a local NGO in our north coast area, the Mattole Restoration Council (MRC), which is working to encourage homeowners in the Mattole River watershed to provide that defensible space by distributing grant money to help the homeowners get the work done. When each household maintains that magical 100-foot clearance, it benefits the entirety of this remote watershed, where it's often extremely difficult for firefighters to get quick entrance and egress on steep, narrow roads in scattered neighborhoods. With less flammable space around homes (and fewer homes that are themselves flammable--but that's another subject), firefighters can concentrate on attacking the flames in the wildland area rather than spending all their time worrying about defending structures.
This led to thoughts of other worthy MRC work: the organization is working on writing a Program Timberland Environmental Impact Report, a document designed to apply to owners throughout the watershed who want to practice sustainable forestry designed to return Mattole forestlands, many of which were highly degraded by mid-20th-century timber harvest practices, to healthy productivity while protecting water quality and other important values. Having a program document like this (i.e., an already-written "checklist"-type document) will make responsible forestry, which can be an expensive proposition for a small landowner, a real possibility for many watershed residents.
Which brought me to Sudden Oak Death. P. ramorum has moved to the very eastern edges of the Mattole River watershed. Soon, the disease could be one more thing for Mattole valley residents to worry about. Along with the MRC, UC Cooperative Extension has been holding informational workshops about SOD, but concern hasn't built as high here as in some areas of coastal California. This could partly be the result of a few dry years during which the pathogen has become less visible in southern Humboldt County because it has caused less tanoak mortality. On another level, though, it's understandable that many Mattole residents may have "wildland management fatigue" from worrying for so many years about fire, fish, and forestry.
Since Sudden Oak Death has not yet impacted the Mattole, there's a real chance that, given funding and political will, residents could do something the limit the spread throughout the watershed. But the disease is tagging along behind all those other equally important concerns. The question that occurs to me at this point, then, is this: Is there a way to unite these seemingly disparate domains? Given the realities of funding, in which each relatively narrow environmental issue attracts its own funding, scientific study, and advocacy groups, could some kind of comprehensive wildland management assistance ever materialize for rural landowners who need it, like the ones in the Mattole?
When our president talks about creating jobs to help our environment, this is what I see: an army of forest management experts and helpers, working in places like the Mattole to address all these wildland management concerns in a comprehensive manner. On any given property, these folks, organized into teams perhaps, would work on fuel hazard reduction and riparian restoration and erosion remediation and sustainable timber production and weed control and habitat protection and protection from insects and diseases. Considering how each of these management activities can often interact synergistically with the other activities, it remains a wonder to me that this hasn't already happened. It may just be that a vision like this, to come to fruition, will require a collective societal decision that wildland management is worth an investment.
The Mattole River: good for many uses.
A wind-driven, grass fire burned through chapparal in China Camp State Park in Marin County yesterday. The park, heavily impacted by Sudden Oak Death, has many dead or dying trees which prompted an all out response - 79 local firefighters, two Cal Fire air tankers and a helicopter quickly contained the blaze.
Photo of China Camp showing many dead (red and grey) oak
The full effects of Sudden Oak Death on wildfire are not yet fully understood but firefighters and researchers alike suspect that dead and dying trees increase fire severity.
Research results presented at the Fourth Sudden Oak Death Science Symposium last week, provided some additional insight into the relationship.
Air tanker dropping retardent on Big Sur Basin Fire (Andrew Molero State Park)
Photo by Kevin Hulsey www.khulsey.com Copyright © 2009
Margaret Metz, a member of the Rizzo Lab, worked on the Big Sur fire analyzing burn severity in areas heavily impacted by Sudden Oak Death. Though she expected to find a direct correlation between impacts of Sudden Oak Death and fire severity, the relationship was not so clear-cut. Her results actually showed fire severity could be predicted by how long Sudden Oak Death had been in a stand. Newly dead trees still have leaves and stands with this material had greater fire intensity. The more of this material, the greater the fire severity.
For more information on Margaret Metz's research and other fire studies, check the COMTF website in July. We'll be posting all of the presentations from the symposium online.
