Will forests flourish after fires? In a warming world, not always

[NickB79]

http://www.nbcnews.com/science/will-forests-flourish-after-fires-warming-world-not-always-6C10534178

You wouldn't know that by looking at Yellowstone National Park, which lost a third of its forest land in a seemingly catastrophic series of wildfires of 1988. Twenty-five years later, the forests are making a stunning comeback.

"The forests regenerated so quickly and so abundantly that even we were surprised," said Monica Turner, an ecologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who has been monitoring Yellowstone since 1988. The regeneration of Yellowstone looks like a textbook case in nature's resilience to wildfires. Will that always be the case?

"We thought Yellowstone would be resilient no matter what," Turner told NBC News. "But the recent climate projections have caused us to question that assumption."

Those projections suggest that the incidence of wildfires will increase significantly by the middle of the 21st century, due to warmer, drier weather in the West. That's expected to sap the ability of forests to recover between one fire and the next. Particularly in the Southwest, wide areas of today's forest land could give way to scrublands, or grasslands. In other areas, the mix of trees will shift, favoring drought-tolerant, fire-resistant species.

We've entered a whole new era, one in which old rules no longer apply.