Word: forested
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Restoring this lost patchiness is critical. Unfortunately, there is no easy equation for doing so, as the optimal distribution of fuel varies widely from forest to forest...
...frequent-fire regime that prevailed in the ponderosa pine forests of Arizona and New Mexico, for example, kept fuels low over widespread areas. In the ponderosa pine forests of Colorado's Front Range, however, big burns were spaced farther apart, allowing flammable material to accumulate. These fires rolled through every few decades or so and occasionally burned extremely hot. Their legacy, says Merrill Kaufmann, a senior scientist with the U.S. Forest Service's Rocky Mountain Research Station, was a mosaic of forested areas that alternated with clearings ranging from 5 acres to 100 acres in size...
...many forest ecologists, manipulating fuel loads--whether by thinning, prescribed burning or a combination of the two--constitutes the best strategy we have for ensuring that the ponderosa pine forests of the present survive into the future. And the good news, says Mark Finney, a researcher with the U.S. Forest Service's Fire Sciences Laboratory in Missoula, Mont., is that it's probably not going to be necessary to thin or prescribe-burn every acre of forest at risk. According to mathematical models that Finney has developed, reducing fuels in a strategic pattern across a more manageable...
...modulate the behavior of big fires. One branch of the Hayman fire, for example, stopped at the edge of an area where a large prescribed burn had been conducted the year before, and the Rodeo-Chediski fire, for its part, was forced to detour around prescribed burns on forest lands managed by the White Mountain Apache tribe...
...prescribed fire at the Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico went off the reservation, igniting the blaze that swept into Los Alamos. Lost in the finger pointing that followed was the fact that the fire would probably not have proved so dangerous had fuel loads in the adjacent forest been lower. And this is precisely why thinning can be useful. As Arizona State University environmental historian Stephen Pyne sees it, thinning is just a tool for "re-creating a habitat for fire...