A combination of climate change and new land use patterns is creating a growth industry in managing wildfires in North America. Choosing a bachelor’s degree in fire science is picking an area that will be busy in both the public and private sector.
A global computer climate modeling experiment done under the National Academy of Science found, “High risk of forest loss is shown for Eurasia, eastern China, Canada, Central America, and Amazonia, with forest extensions into the Arctic…” and less rain and snow runoff in many areas.
The trend is growing because of the abandonment of small farmsteads across the northern Midwest creates more forest lands. A classic cycle is for a section of land to be sold off for house lots on the surrounding roads, leaving the area in the center to grow into forest that will eventually threaten the new homes with a wildfire.
Farmers and other landholders in Michigan even earn greenhouse gas emission credits bought by the state for re-forestation projects, and each year thousands of acres of new forest are planted.
A one-two punch
A warming climate hits forests with a one-two punch combination.
First, the warmer temperatures encourage fire-prone drought conditions and build fuel supplies after winters of low snowfall and rainfall. This can cycle into a crisis mode when the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) adds to the drying trend.
Second, as warmer temperatures move north into the boreal forests, they bring infestation of insects that move into new habitat. In Alaska the spruce beetle has ravaged the Alaska Sitka Spruce in a northward march over the past two decades.
The emerald ash borer, an invasive species introduced to the U.S. and Canada from Asia in the 1990s, has killed at least 50 to 100 million ash trees in North America and threatens damage equal to the Chestnut blight and Dutch elm disease. As land management agencies struggle to contain it in the 14 states it infests, the emerald ash borer creates vast areas of fuel for potential wildfires.
The feedback loop
A study of insect infestation of forests in 2000 concluded that the loss of trees in the boreal forests were already 1.3 to 2 times as great as the acreage lost to fire, and the insect-killed trees will eventually burn.
“Global change will have demonstrable changes in the frequency and intensity of pest outbreaks, particularly at the margins of host ranges,’ the author’s warned. “The consequent shunting of carbon back to the atmosphere rather than to sequestration in forests as biomass is thought to have positive feedback to global warming.”
A third element in the boreal forest is the observed reduction in permafrost in Alaska and Canada, which is allowing forests to extend northward into new territory.
In 2011 the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) reported its first wildlife of the season on March 10, when wildfire fuel is usually buried under several feet of snow. “Spring was very dry across most of the state, the Interior specifically,” BLM noted. By the end of the season BLM had fought 515 fires that burned 267,782 acres, and BLM is one of only three government agencies responding to wildfires in the state.
Other states like Texas also had record fire seasons last year. This calls for more specialists with a bachelor in fire science background. read more »
