Disturbance

An OSU Mini Symposium on the June 2021 Heat Dome Foliage Scorch happened Friday, Nov 19. see https://www.forestry.oregonstate.edu/heat-dome for recordings of the talks. The work was featured on OBP https://www.opb.org/article/2021/11/22/oregon-trees-cooked-by-summer-heat-waves/ and in the Oregonian https://www.oregonlive.com/environment/2021/11/experts-detail-oregon-forest-damage-in-aftermath-of-june-heat-dome-long-term-effects-unknown.html.  

The 2020 Fires: Opportunities for discovery abound!  Written by Cheryl Friesen, Science Liaison, WNF

In late October 2020, my husband, dog, and I were tucked into an AirBnB after being displaced by the Holiday Farm Fire. Research requests began pouring in even as we juggled cleaning up our destroyed homesite and re-assembling our lives. State and Federal agencies, municipalities, universities, and timber industry research groups were keenly interested in getting into the Labor Day Fire footprints as soon as possible. The fires were historic, creating opportunities to study a dynamic in moist, west-side Cascade forests that had not occurred for a century. I became the point person to handle the inquiries.  With help from Dr. Kevan Moffett (Washington State University), we bundled the early requests into an “Omnibus,” creating collaborative opportunities among various science communities across our large physical and bureaucratic landscape. A year later, research and monitoring has been completed or is ongoing for the 13 parties in the Omnibus proposal and an additional 10 research proposals. Researchers were not allowed into fire areas last fall unless they were escorted by “red carded” FS personnel (i.e., people experienced with safety issues in fire perimeters). We also required sawyers to provide an extra layer of security in case tree-fall blocked safe passage out of the study areas. There remain areas too dangerous to enter: bridges were burned out, plastic culverts were melted, fire-weather-driven mini-tornadoes dropped thousands of trees onto roads in massive piles, and active fire still persists in snags and underground hollows. District Rangers have been both supportive and cautious; balancing safety risk with the eagerness to document post-fire landscapes. While some researchers have been frustrated with the pace, the capacity to respond to their interests, and at times some hard “no’s,” overall the pathway to discovery has successfully facilitated a lot of science. The next several years will be spent digging into post-fire data on issues ranging from upland and riparian vegetation response, mercury mobilization in our streams, smoke-related particulates in our snowfields, changes in landslide risk, alteration in soil and water chemistry, and the capacity for the human community to recover.

Where does Andrews Forest fit into this growing portfolio of fire research? A portion of the Andrews Forest landscape was affected by the Holiday Farm Fire, and some research has been initiated. In the 1980s and 1990s Andrews Forest scientists produced a significant body of fire history science which influenced the Northwest Forest Plan. As we continue to discuss how disturbances affect our landscapes, the Andrews Forest research program has the talent to be on the forefront and will certainly influence the next iteration of PNW forest management.

The 2020 Holiday Farm Fire and access to burned forest on McKenzie River Trust lands have attracted writers and artists who want to wrestle with the tensions among tragedy, stark beauty, and hope in the fire-blackened landscape.  Former writer-in-residence theologian Vince Miller (University of Dayton) returned to explore the theme of hope in collaboration with photographer David Paul Bayles.  Painter Erika Osborne (Colorado State University) visited to extend the fire-themed work she has been practicing in California and Baja.  Four book artists led by Eugene artist Susan Lowdermilk visited in October to exercise their creative practices with materials and inspiration from the fire zone.  A long-term art-sci collaboration of photographer David Paul Bayles and researcher Fred Swanson, involving thousands of photographs in several distinct bodies of works, has been shared in a duet performance via an ecoartspace video and in an ecoartspace blog post.  In each case, the Andrews Forest offers a green frame of reference for inquiry in the fire zone. Stay tuned for fire-themed programming from The Spring Creek Project and the Andrews Forest Reflections program to see the fruits of this work and more.

Photo: David Paul Bayles hard at work amidst fireweed at Finn Rock on McKenzie River Trust lands along the McKenzie, by Fred Swanson.

Eight months after the ignition of the Holiday Farm Fire we are seeing the first flush of green in the understory of the burned forest and the first new buildings under construction in the McKenzie Valley.  The community recovery from this catastrophe and the ecological response to this forest disturbance will take years and decades, but recently the landscape is changing on a weekly or even daily basis. The burned areas within the Willamette National Forest remain closed for public safety, and as the spring dries we watch Watershed Two nervously for signs of flare ups from winter holdovers (there have been re-ignitions reported elsewhere within the fire perimeter). Thanks to the support of our partner institutions and generous donations from our community, the Andrews Forest is on pace to restore critical infrastructure needed to mount our scientific response to the fire.  We are using donated funds to restore researcher access paths in the burned small watersheds ahead of a busy field season.  In addition to recovering our network of long-term vegetation plots, soil moisture and undercanopy microclimate stations and hyporheic wells, new work has been funded that leverages this long-term work to improve our understanding of fire effects on belowground nutrient cycling, aquatic macroinvertebrate communities, water quality and forest regeneration. 

Find out more on our archived Fire Updates page, view fire photos in our photo gallery, or watch videos of the fire at our  Andrews Forest YouTube channel.    To support our fire recovery efforts, consider making a donation: https://andrewsforest.oregonstate.edu/donate