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It will be up to future managers, scientists, and homeowners to solve these fire challenges.
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The Western Klamath Restoration Partnership is also manifesting a positive trajectory by embodying an “all hands, all lands” perspective to encourage private and public partners to solve some of these challenging problems together.
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In fact, one might say there has been a prescribed fire renaissance over the past decade as more people return to this practice to help reduce fuels, restore ecosystems, and protect communities. An example of this is the growing support for expanding the use of prescribed fire, or controlled burning, which was once a common way of managing California ecosystems. One thing that seems particularly evident is that fire can be a great unifier. These are daunting and often human-driven factors that we can reverse with effective policies and sufficient resources.
#CALIFORNIA WILDFIRES HOW TO#
The program teaches participants how to use controlled burns to manage land. Wood and other students from the club joined representatives from various organizations for the Prescribed Fire Training Exchange on Yurok land in the Klamath Mountains last year. More homes are being built within or near wildlands and constructed with materials that can often burn easily.įorestry major Tenaya Wood, president of HSU's Student Association for Fire Ecology club, works a fire line. 15 of the 20 largest fires in California state history have occurred since 2000įinally, the population of California has grown rapidly over the past 75 years, increasing the risk of devastating wildfires. These conditions are quite common around and within most communities. The federal government's focus on fire suppression has resulted in denser forests with more continuous fuel to burn in an intense fire. These fires were typically more benign, burning more often but at lower intensities. For thousands of years prior to Euro-American settlement, Native American tribes and lightning fires burned 5 million acres in California every year, with many areas burning every 10 years or so. This increase in evaporative demand more readily dries out fuels that can easily ignite.Įxacerbating the effects of climate change on fire is the legacy of past fire and forest management. Under warmer conditions, the atmosphere also draws more water from the ground. The fire season in the Sierra Nevada, for example, has doubled in length and is now more than 10 weeks longer than it was three decades ago. Warmer temperatures are extending the fire season, meaning that fires are burning earlier in the spring and later into the fall. This seemingly modest difference has profound impacts on our state. The marked increase in greenhouse gases over the past century has increased the average temperature in California by 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit. The 2018 fire season is the culmination of three main factors: climate change, past fire and forest management practices, and development in the wildland urban interface. We can surely agree that more needs to be done to limit the impacts of these events. The tragic fires of 2018 are part of a broader pattern occurring across the West that shows no sign of abating in the near future unless we make substantial changes. In fact, 15 of the 20 largest fires in California state history have occurred since 2000. If a fire season like this didn't occur last year, it would have been this year or next year or the year after that. Most scientists, managers, and firefighters would tell you that last year's fire season was not a surprise. The 2018 wildfire season in California was the deadliest and most destructive on record, burning almost 1.9 million acres-an area 2.5 times the size of Rhode Island and more area than had ever burned in California within the past 50 years.