THis is NOT true. Many seeds require a fire to germinate. The region will come back very soon.
“THis is NOT true. Many seeds require a fire to germinate. The region will come back very soon.”
It is this way every time. In a few years there will be all these articles expressing surprise at the rebound....unless of course scientists try to step in to fix it.
Normally that is true, but these mega-fires fed by excess undergrowth burn much longer and hotter than typical nature-caused fires DESTROYING the seeds and pine cones.
Thank you for a demonstration of appalling ignorance. It will come back all right, to what? After losing millions of tons of topsoil to be washed down into reservoirs, there will be miles of Arctostaphylos sprouted from root crowns, six feet tall, and with no breaks for wildlife or forbs. In a few years, there will then be so many seedling pines that it will pack up completely. Moisture demand by that many trees will dry up streams by as much as 35%. The next wave is beetle kill. Worse, if there is then another fire, with all that standing dry wood left behind, what you get is enough heat to fire the soil into a ceramic. It then takes jackhammers to plant trees.
In the mean time, the cleared landscape is then wide open for the intrusion of roadside weeds into a perfect germination medium. I wish I could show you the miles of musk thistle and cheat grass that resulted from this idiot "let it burn" policy in Mesa Verde National Park. It is a disaster.
This has all happened before, many times. Drop the mythology and get with reality. You see, people no longer harvest pine cones as the Indians once did, which played just as important a role in maintaining a spacious forest as did fire. Fire alone will not fix this mess. It takes work done by people, managing animals, harvesting trees, and reducing predation so that herbivores can keep the brush under control and let fewer trees develop. It may be possible to recreate the forest the Indians reluctantly bequeathed, but not by leaving it alone.