Sub/Alpine meadows, fires, & climate change

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Water
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Sub/Alpine meadows, fires, & climate change

Post by Water » October 12th, 2022, 8:21 pm

Struck me after re-visiting Indian Heaven Wilderness the last two weekends. A lot of meadows along the old Cascade Crest Trail where it's abundantly clear there are numerous trees 5 to 50 years old encroaching on meadows, growing the tree islands, etc.

This same trend is visible in Jefferson Park, Elk Meadows, and I'm sure quite a number of other places I am omitting.

What I wonder about is historical human impact. Maybe Indian Heaven is an especially good example. I've read about some fires in the late 1800s/early 1900s on the berry fields. It's a known place for human impact/resource harvesting, since before European 'intervention'

And the recent fires that 'almost' torched Jefferson Park. People covet these areas for the open park-land they provide, but I really wonder how some of these meadow-parklands will look in 50 to 150 years, they will only become more and more treed. Perhaps it is inevitable fire will get them, but likely at a peak fire danger situation that is a high intensity burn...where the soil gets destroyed. My understanding is that there's an extremely high bar for controlled burns in wilderness area. I had previously emailed with some burn ecology person in Deschutes NF who was involved in burn plans on the South Sister main route before the flat section (not sure if it ever happened).

Not sure where this is headed exactly but I swear some of those areas with dry meadow plants would benefit from a burn in late October or something--on a sunny dry few days after it rained for a week and the nights are long and cold. armchair analysis..
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adamschneider
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Re: Sub/Alpine meadows, fires, & climate change

Post by adamschneider » October 12th, 2022, 8:44 pm

Native Americans did a LOT of landscaping with fire. From 1491 by Charles Mann:

Image

[PDF version with explanations]

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drm
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Re: Sub/Alpine meadows, fires, & climate change

Post by drm » October 13th, 2022, 6:59 am

Native Americans did do burns in the local area to encourage meadows and berries. How that would work now with the longer fire season, I am not sure. Gifford Pinchot is doing a burn south of Mt Adams in the coming weeks, but I read somewhere recently that the weather conditions required for a planned burn are quite rare now. There might only be 10 days in a year. It takes years of planning and approvals to do one, and then if the right weather doesn't come along, it is canceled. And there is still strong resistance to them from nearby towns.

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Re: Sub/Alpine meadows, fires, & climate change

Post by BigBear » October 13th, 2022, 8:33 am

Climate change is indeed real, the problem with the discussion of the past generation is that is based on bad science. Let me again say climate change is real. The problem with the science is that the tracking of the climate began with the industrial revolution and scientists noted that the earth was getting warmer and thus incorrectly concluded that it was due to the industrial revolution and the subsequent use of fossil fuels, ignoring other key components, chiefly that the population of the earth is out of control which has resulted in both urban and non-urban growth (fossil fuels, wood-fires, clearing of forests for both cities and crops). The truly bad part of the science was it ignored the 10,000-plus years of global warming before they started tracking the numbers. Where you sit this very instant was probably covered in 400 feet of ice 10K to 12K years ago. All of that ice melted, the subsequent lakes (eg. Klamath Lake and Tule Lake) formed and then evaporated after the melting ice melted out, centuries of continued warming occurred, the lakes evaporated, and then the scientists started cataloging the numbers. It's a sad fact: the earth is warming up and using coal-fired electrical power plants instead of oil won't change that. Even lowering the population from 8 billion back to a hundred thousand people won't change that. It's not human-caused, its a bigger cycle of climatic change than mere mortals can control.

Indian Heaven is a strange example to choose because this area had been altered over thousands of years by the Indians who traveled great distances each fall to harvest the berries, and to maintain this source of food, they routinely altered the environment to meet their needs. The encroachment of trees is nothing new to the area. The only change is the lack of routine fires that kept the forests at bay. It's not a symptom of global warming.

The biggest symptom of global warming is the growth of plants/trees at higher elevations which used to be held back by long winters and snow accumulation. Again, I'm not saying global warming isn't occurring, just that it didn't start int he 19th century. These same plants were held at bay hundreds of miles to the south by the glaciers before they started melting centuries ago. Global warming isn't a myth, just the belief we started it, can stop it or even slow it down. It's much like thinking you could build a ship big enough and heavy enough not to sink when it hit an iceberg. Humans are insignificant dust specks when nature does what it wants.

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Re: Sub/Alpine meadows, fires, & climate change

Post by Aimless » October 13th, 2022, 11:58 am

I respect your choice to derive your own conclusions about the causes of climate change, but I think I will go with the consensus views of thousands of climate scientists that the trillions of tons of greenhouse gases released from the burning of fossil fuels have had a decisively warming effect on the global climate.

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Re: Sub/Alpine meadows, fires, & climate change

Post by jvangeld » October 13th, 2022, 12:35 pm

I can't find it now, but I remember reading that the Klickitat and Yakama Indians would pick visit Indian Heaven to pick berries. They would dry the berries over a fire, and then when they left they would encourage their fires to spread. So no one was in the area at the end of berry month when the fires were clearing the meadows. It was some history of the Wind River or such which described how the Indians moved from their winter villages up to their camas meadows in the Spring and then up to the Huckleberry meadows in the Summer.

This isn't what I am thinking of, but it is a valuable resource, with a number of quotations from the McClellan Expedition.
https://ecoshare.info/uploads/ccamp/syn ... ._1999.pdf
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Re: Sub/Alpine meadows, fires, & climate change

Post by teachpdx » October 13th, 2022, 1:32 pm

Fires do play a role in maintaining the boundaries of meadows, but snowpack/depth is an even stronger natural influence in their boundaries.

(this will be about maintaining meadows, not the processes that created them... humans, fires, avalanches, etc.)

In the early 20th century not only was the snow deeper, but it fell throughout a longer portion of the year. A sapling that may have started growing in a meadow margin the previous summer would spend too much time under deep snow (with snow being the most consistently deep in meadows) to survive until the next growing season. Or if it did survive the first winter, the growing season was too short for it to establish itself to survive a second winter. But as the climate has warmed and the snowpack has reduced, the number of days that a sapling tree has a fighting chance to grow has increased a little bit. If the meadow thaws 10 days earlier in the spring and the first big dump of snow is 10 days later, that tree has 20 more days to try to establish itself.

The success of tree growth is literally measured in days throughout the growing year... and it's why our mountains have such a distinct 'timberline' between treeless alpine tundra above and forest below, and why trees near timberline are so stunted compared to others just 1000 feet down the mountain. There's this concept of "the 50 degree isotherm" and it's the line above which the highest monthly average temperature does not exceed 50 degrees... and above this isotherm trees just simply cannot grow. The most prominent location of this line is the division between the boreal forest and the tundra in the Arctic, a line which is moving over 30 miles north every decade.

So as the planet warms and the tree growing seasons get just a little bit longer, small trees at the margins of meadows have the perfect combination of sunlight, moisture, and warmth... an environment more ideal than any other location in the forest to grow and thrive. And if a fire does come along, these smaller trees will be tapped into more moisture than their taller neighbors and therefore much more likely to survive a burn without being torched to a crisp.

As far as warming trends, the earth has been warming since the end of the last ice age. But the RATE at which the earth has been warming in the past 150 years is orders of magnitude more substantial than the rate at which it was warming in the previous thousands of years. Looking back at ice cores, previous ice ages going back 800,000 years saw an average post-ice age increase of 5-7 degrees C over the following 5000 years. The temperature in the past 100 years has increased 0.7 degrees C, roughly 10 times the average post-ice age warmup. A ten-fold increase in any sort of data is pretty hard to ignore or rationalize away. Saying that 'the tracking of the climate' began with the Industrial Revolution, while accurate, is disingenuous at best. Yes, that's when modern observation and recordkeeping started but it completely ignores the fact that we have a prehistoric record that we can scientifically interpret, the exact same prehistoric record that lets us know that there were glaciers over our heads 10000 years ago. It's like saying we know nothing about Neanderthals or dinosaurs because Mr. Science wasn't there back then with a Polaroid to capture it.
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Re: Sub/Alpine meadows, fires, & climate change

Post by drm » October 13th, 2022, 6:14 pm

PS - science has not "ignored the 10,000-plus years of global warming before they started tracking the numbers" - they have studied it in excrutiating depth - because it was a previous period of climate change and so needed to be understood. That understanding provides one of the key pieces of evidence to what is going on now - a separate period of climate change caused by us. We know the warming from the post ice age has ended because we understand those cycles.

Back to the subject of those meadows. There are lots of people who would like "us" (presumably the FS) to do something to encourage more berry terrain. After the Native Amer. berry picking of those times, they would head to the lowlands near the Columbia for the winter. So the fires up high were not a threat to them, should they in fact spread.

The place is called Indian Heaven because after all the salmon processing, the many tribes would head up there for some inter-tribal fun, like horse races at Indian Racetrack. So maybe they just let some campfires get out of control after eating some over-ripe berries.

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sgyoung
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Re: Sub/Alpine meadows, fires, & climate change

Post by sgyoung » October 15th, 2022, 4:02 pm

a very user-friendly summary of historic climate change that nicely demonstrates current warning exceeds what you'd expect from natural variability: https://xkcd.com/1732/

I don't understand how people think science and scientists work. Does it seems plausible that a climate researcher would read this thread and suddenly realize they forgot to consider pre-industrial revolution climate variability? This is maddening. Fossil fuels are greenhouse gasses. Adding them to the atmosphere in huge quantities leads to warming that accounts for unique variance above and beyond chance fluctuations. It's honestly not that hard to get; the motivation to deny this fundamental science and desperately come up with alternative explanations requires so much more mental energy that accepting the basic and obvious science.

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Re: Sub/Alpine meadows, fires, & climate change

Post by Charley » October 19th, 2022, 4:45 pm

sgyoung wrote:
October 15th, 2022, 4:02 pm
a very user-friendly summary of historic climate change that nicely demonstrates current warning exceeds what you'd expect from natural variability: https://xkcd.com/1732/
Nice link; really puts it in perspective.

On the other hand, motivated reasoning is incredibly powerful. :)

Back to the main topic:

Where I'm from (East Tennessee), I grew up hearing that the "balds" on top of our mountains were caused by first peoples' burning. But I see that theory is nowhere on the wikipedia article, and apparently no one really knows why!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appalachian_balds

So it must be aliens.
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