2018-12-01_Discover

26 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM

ABOVE: JEFF HENRY/NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

Burn

Notice

Thirty years after flames

ripped through Yellowstone,

scientists study the sites

to understand future fires.

BY KRISTEN POPE

→

In 1988, ecologist Monica

Turner found herself on the

shores of Yellowstone Lake as the

forest burned. She happened to be

in the national park to collaborate

with fellow ecologist Bill Romme to

study historical ires with computer

modeling. When the enormous new

conagration took off — coughing

smoke into the air, into their eyes and

lungs, and creating its own weather

patterns — the researchers knew it

would be signiicant. That fall, they

returned to the park, and Turner got

her irst aerial view of the aftermath.

She could see that the ire’s damage

had not been contiguous, but rather a

mosaic of burned and unburned areas.

Turner has never looked away.

A total of just over 1,240 square

miles would burn that year — more

than a third of the park — and

although news reports at the time

marked Yellowstone as destroyed, that

hasn’t been the case. In the 30 years

since, Turner, now at the University

of Wisconsin-Madison, has amassed

a considerable amount of data and

scores of papers.

What she and her colleagues have

found was surprising at irst. Many

of the burned areas renewed from

within through serotinous cones, which

require heat to melt their resin coatings

and release their seeds. Perennial

grasses and wildowers sprouted the

irst year after the ires and owered

profusely the second year. Aspen trees,

which typically regenerate from asexual

root suckering, began to regrow as

seedlings — something researchers had

never seen in that area before.

Romme, who is now retired from

Colorado State University, and

colleagues have reconstructed over

10,000 years of Yellowstone’s ire

history and found that this monstrous

ire was actually the kind that happens

every 100 to 300 years as part of a

natural cycle.

“The 1988 ires were not an

ecological catastrophe, and I think

the main thing that we learned

from all of that research is just how

resilient Yellowstone’s forests were,”

Turner says.

Yet, as the planet warms, drought,

he Yellowstone ires of 1988 can serve as

a benchmark for how forests might respond

to repeated burning, and the hot and

furious future that may await them.

Wildfires that torched trees

across Yellowstone National Park

in 1988 left a mosaic of burned

and unburned forests in their

wake. The fires altered the park

landscape for years to come.

Notes

From

Earth