The Benefits of Fire on the Land
Low severity fire burns the understory vegetation, making way for new plant life.
Fire and disturbance have always been a natural component of the earth's ecosystems. As natural as wind and rain, fire helps create a patchwork of habitat that is appealing to a variety of lifeforms.
Indigenous tribes have used low severity fire for thousands of years to manage land for culturally-significant plant species. Through repeated fire cycles, our forests have become fire dependent. Fire is essential to ecosystem health. The seeds of the wildflowers that you see after a fire have been hiding in the soil since the last fire.
Fires also clear the forest of underbrush, leaving the forest floor open to sunlight. As a result, grasses, herbs, and shrubs respond and become food for many wildlife species.
Fire events can also provide a layer of ash over the soil that is rich in nitrogen. This ash layer is a gift to the ecosystem. Where there has been an accumulation of fallen branches, leaves, and needles, a low severity fire will reduce this material and provide nutrients to the soil. This not only gives life to a diversity of species, it also aids the next fire cycle in being of a lower severity because of the work the previous fire did to reduce understory fuels.
Lodgepole pine cones are serotinous, meaning they need heat from fire to melt the wax coating on their cones to release their seeds for the next generations of trees to grow. Credit: The Pine Barrens
Camas relies on fire and has served as an important Indigenous food source for millennia. Credit: Jamie Hale
Fireweed is a wildflower species that grows across the west, often being one of the first plant species to spread its seed after fire.
Some plants cannot germinate without fire. “Serotinous” plants are those that require wildfire heat to disperse their seeds. Trees such as knobcone and lodgepole pines are serotinous; their pinecones are coated in a wax that must melt before they can open and release their seeds. But for fire, these unique pines would not have evolved.
Fireweed is a beautiful, purple-flowering perennial that can be seriously resistant to fire. Even in shallow soils, this relative of the primrose is a prolific disperser of seed, making it one of the first species to establish in newly-opened burned sites.
Another hardy native bulb, Camassia (aka camas), is an early summer staple across the west. This edible perennial thrives in areas burned by fire. In fact, Native Americans reportedly set fires to optimize the production of this essential food source.
This is all to say fire has a critical role on landscapes across the world, and especially here in the Klamath-Siskiyou. As we learn to adapt to a future with more fire, we must be cognizant of the benefits fire offers the land and the species (plant, animal, and human) who rely on it.
Want to learn more about fire in the Klamath-Siskiyou?
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