All he's saying is give brush a chance

[tabatha]

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-halsey26-2008nov26,0,4004542.story

Fire prevention policy has centered on a much-disputed study published in 1983 in Science magazine, which suggested that modern fire suppression had caused too much fuel build-up. In the article, UC Riverside professor Richard Minnich concluded that, historically, fires were small and burned frequently -- leaving a patchwork mosaic of fuels of varying ages that prevented fires from scorching vast acreage. He believed chaparral less than 20 years old didn't have enough dead material to burn.

This encouraged land managers to conduct prescribed burns in the backcountry to get rid of the old, most volatile fuel.

But many scientists have since rejected the findings.

Hugh Safford, ecologist for the U.S. Forest Service Pacific Southwest region, said wind-driven fires roar through young chaparral and old chaparral alike. While older vegetation has more dead wood to intensify the flames, it matters only when the vegetation is adjacent to homes.

"Under Santa Ana wind conditions, it doesn't matter how old it is," he said. "Re-burns in 3-year-old chaparral are common, and some of these fires even burned through 1-year-old chaparral."

Jon Keeley, a fire ecologist for the U.S. Geological Survey, suspects the pre-human wildfires were huge -- but happened only once a century in any given area. The likely mechanism: Lightning during a monsoonal August storm started a fire in the high mountains that smoldered for months; the Santa Anas picked it up in October or November and drove it all the way to the coast.

Because native Americans didn't arrive in California until about 10,000 years ago, and evolution takes much more time than 10 millenniums to do anything worthwhile, this model is what the plants adapted to.

What the plants did not have time to adapt to, Keeley said, is fire every 10 or 20 years, as has been happening in recent times. The chaparral and coastal sage scrub -- a related plant community with many of the same species -- aren't growing back in areas that are burning frequently, letting the weeds take over.

"It's a real paradox," said Keeley. "You have these species that are absolutely fire-dependent. But the one thing wiping them out is fire."

[drmeow]

1. If they think that the desert only burned

every 100 years or so and now its burning every 10 - 20 years, why is is burning so much more often now? The article doesn't say and I wish it did. Are humans causing more fires and that's why? While a decent number of recent fires are caused by people, there have been quite a few which were cause by lightning (especially in Arizona due to monsoon storms - and we have certainly have chaparral shrublands here).

[tabatha]

2. I think global warming is also a factor.

[drmeow]

3. I just feel like they left a big

hole in the article by not addressing that question - even to say they don't know why the frequency increased.

To me it is an important piece of the puzzle over how to deal with fires.

Maybe it is simply that there is less chaparral due to more development and its not that the frequency of the fires are increasing but that they now keep burning the same areas over and over again. We've paved so much of the desert that the same places burn over and over.

[tabatha]

4. Yes, weeds contribute to the flammability of an area.

They grow fast, and by the summer they dry out and are ready to burn.

Here is a page that may help:

http://www.californiachaparral.com/threatstochaparral.html