MBCA Boardmember Mark Wheeler, who is also well known locally as a writer and naturalist, wrote this in a highly informative but sobering article in last week's Hi-Desert Star on changes in the local plant communities that increase the desert's chances of wildfire.Director of Natural History for the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum Mark Dimmitt wrote: “During my 40 years of wildflower chasing, I never saw or heard of a large desert fire below 3000 feet elevation until the 1990s….”
Of course, “large” is a relative term that needs some perspective to make any sense, and this is usually provided by a comparison. And, on comparison, open desert land wildfires historically haven’t ranked anywhere near the magnitude of fires in other landscape zones such as forest, chaparral, valley grassland and so on.
Yet, anyone who saw the Sawtooth Fire of 2006 might tend to disagree. After all, this is the desert, and that fire burned over 61,000 acres. It destroyed 50 homes and 92 other structures and caused one resident death. If that isn’t comparative magnitude, what is?
He summarizes:
Exotic grasses and the Sahara Mustard are extremely aggressive and will spread especially quickly into disturbed sites, whether they are disturbed by fire, grading, flooding or otherwise. Physiological adaptations give these plants a distinct advantage over most natives in recovery after fire incidents, and their growth habits extend the fire season. To whatever extent possible, these plants must be discouraged from becoming established. Failing this, we risk losing the desert to their weedy rule, and losing desert homes to increasingly larger wildfires.
Learn more about how we got this way in the rest of the article.
FOR MORE INFO ON THIS TOPIC: See the Plant Life and Invasive Mustard pages of the MBCA Website. Also, see more posts on Plant Life and Fire on this blog.
