Nat Talk: Wildfire – A Tale of Two Backcountries

thank you emma and thank you all for joining us tonight for the talk wildfire a tale of two back countries with dr megan jennings it's a very timely topic and something we should all know a lot more about as emma said i'm judy gradwal president and ceo of the san diego natural history museum and although our building in balboa park remains closed for the time being our work to bring natural history to our community has not ceased uh this week we finally briefly had a taste of some fall weather and our blog has a story about how local plants and animals change in the fall and i suggest anyone who's interested uh take a look at that we've also hosted some excellent talks recently that are available um online one of the museum's own paleontologist dr ashley poost gave an informal lunchtime lecture last friday called before there were cats and if you'd like to dig into carnivores and their teeth be sure to visit our facebook page to watch the recording and also please keep an eye out for more of these lunchtime pop-up talks which all take place live on our facebook the next of our evening gnat talks is called love of land and in it michael connolly mix wish will discuss traditional kumiyai practices and their relationship to the land this talk takes place november 18th and you can get tickets at our website starting next week of course none of these activities could take place without your support the tickets you purchased tonight your donations and your facebook shares all help our mission thrive during this time and we thank you on to tonight's talk the 2019-2020 session season of nat talks is made possible by presenting sponsor the downing family foundation and media partner kpbs the public media station serving san diego and imperial counties tonight's speaker is dr megan jennings megan is a conservation ecologist and co-director of san diego state university's institute for ecological monitoring and management her research generally focuses on informing conservation and management planning and specifically incorporating landscape dynamics into connectivity planning she worked for over a decade as a wildlife biologist for the u.s forest service in san diego where her years of experience in land management informed her perspective as a researcher megan strives to work at the interface of science and management developing applied research to address management and conservation issues and communicating results and real world recommendations to decision makers and managers and i understand she's put together a retrospective talk tonight which will be a real treat so with that um let's welcome let's welcome megan jennings thank you for that introduction and yes this will be a little bit of a ride through um my experiences in my career and let's see here and as you'll see i created a bit of an expanded talk title here because what i'm what i'm going to talk a lot about is not just wildfire but biodiversity and wildfire in san diego and it might seem like um when i talk about being a wildlife biologist it might seem like what does that have to do with wildfire but um as as you'll see different pieces and and times in my career have actually continually brought these elements together um and really made me so curious about how one affects the other and how they interrelate and what a perfect place to be working in san diego county where we have such broad biodiversity we are a biodiversity hot spot but we also face frequent fire and that's one of the things i've been exploring over the last uh close to two decades that i've been here in san diego county so as judy mentioned i'm a wildlife biologist by training um that is my passion that is how i came to be working in ecology it's it's how uh i came to this work from from the get-go and you'll see there's there's quite a few mammals on this this picture here that's a lot of what i focus on um at least in my early research and a lot of the positions that i took throughout my career was focused on studying mammals study wildlife movement as judy mentioned i've been very interested in landscape connectivity and mammals are often good indicators especially larger mammals like carnivores indicators of that connectivity so we can we can look at their movement behaviors and we can understand how they navigate our landscapes and how we can improve those conditions through conservation actions to make sure that those those populations and those communities of species are are protected so you might think what does wildlife have to do with wildfire well when i first came to california i worked for this really fascinating study called the fire and fire surrogate study and that was my first introduction to fire i had been working on different projects since i had graduated from college working with whitetail deer and a variety of other species but this position sounded really interesting one of the key things that that drew me in was it was about wildfire and wildlife so the fire and fire surrogate study was this study across a network of sites as you'll see in this map here um across the united states to really get a sense for how could we we start to address this problem that we knew existed the fact that we had not had enough fire in our forests they were not necessarily healthy and we needed to do something to rectify that and fire is one way but also fire surrogates so in other words are there mechanical treatments that we could do that might replicate fire and in in addition to just asking the question about how that might change fuel loads or vegetation composition this study was i think really amazing in in the interdisciplinary nature of it they were looking at wildlife plant composition fuels entomology soils pathology just such a wide range of things and i think perhaps looking back on it this inspired me to think big how can we put all these pieces together in these interrelated systems to really understand the impacts of wildfire the impacts of dynamic systems the impacts of ecological changes on the area different areas of interest and then put that together into something that helps us figure out how to take action but i was just a seasonal employee i was doing nest searching um doing point point calls for birds doing small mammal trapping lots of fun stuff out in the field i did this work in the in the sierra nevada at uh blodgett forest which is a forest that's managed by uc berkeley and i met some folks who introduced me to other folks at uc berkeley and that took me back to my love of mammals and carnivores and i went to lassen volcanic national park and i worked on these really cool critters the um uh sierra nevada red fox a rare subspecies of red fox that exists at high elevations a very limited population but we were following them around the lassen area they've since been found in more areas so that's really exciting and just had an opportunity to to explore a different part of california and so i wasn't really working on anything related to fire but i hang around long enough that fire came up again so i started doing work with their biology programs working for a researcher when i was doing the fox work but then the parks natural resource program wanted to be doing some surveys prior to burning for noxious weeds as well as the california spotted owl we worry a lot about conducting burns or forest health activities in a way that might disturb owls in particular nesting spotted owls and so we would go out hike all night long through the through the park calling for owls because we had several prescribed burns that were planned and so we wanted to go survey for those so i was tangentially related to fire but because what i was doing i was termed a fire biotech so a biological technician really focused on things related to fire and because that was my position i was also trained to be a firefighter um i was trained to participate in a fuels crew where i learned to firefighting techniques i learned about prescribed fire i learned about prescribed natural fire i was able to participate in going out with a what's called a fire use module if you've heard the term prescribed natural fire or let burn um it's where a fire naturally ignites maybe through um lightning and we let them burn and so i have to have the cool experience of watching that and taking notes and seeing if we were meeting management actions and this photo is from the photo in the upper left i don't know if you can see my mouse but this is from working on that fuels crew to conduct an actual prescribed burn to do a lot of prep i learned about collecting information to that that gets you to the point where you can actually do the burning um testing fuels seeing how dry they are the different components of the entire fuel composition of an area and then finally on a very chilly number of evenings right around this time uh many years ago we lit that burn unit off and i got to see what it was like to actually participate in a prescribed fire that was focused on restoring forest health in the northern in the southern cascades in the northern part of california but again that job didn't last forever i was a seasonal employee and i had the opportunity to apply and was um selected to become a wildlife biologist on the cleveland national forest and so i came down to san diego and learned a whole lot of new things i showed up in san diego in june 2003 and i think you all may may recall or hopefully many of you recall what happened in october of 20 of 2003 right about this time um 17 years ago the cedar fire ignited and it ripped through it was unlike anything i knew from from learning about fire over the past few few years prior to coming to san diego it was a whole new experience um i was busy working from the very beginning um working on on the fire oops excuse me just trying to move my window so i don't have to see myself there we go um i was learning a lot about um about a type of fire that i wasn't familiar with yet um and in fact oops hold on a second here i got my windows all screwed up there we go um so during the fire i worked as a resource advisor um which is a job where you help advise are there any fire suppression activities that might impact our natural resources that we might want to adjust if we can given that life and protection of life and property are the priority i worked on suppression rehab in other words where we had built dozer lines and built a hand line to protect um communities after the fire fire is over we try to restore those to their to their prior condition we tried to undo that that um those marks on the landscape i participated in a post-fire burn area assessment restoration protection measures we conducted monitoring i mean this took over my life as a resource specialist and a biologist for the forest for actually the better part of at least a year and it really shaped the way that i thought about um this new system that i had been introduced to and and previously was this dense stand of chaparral and was now this this burned what appeared to be a moonscape and what i learned a lot about is the difference between a wind-dominated fire and a fuel dominated fire so when i was working in northern california i was working in i got my animation screwed up here okay we'll just leave it like this i was working in a fuel dominated system and so those are typically forests as compared to here in san diego we often have wind-dominated fires so um that's occurs in our shrubs and grasslands it's our santa ana winds that that really drive those fires it doesn't so much matter how much fuel has accumulated it can be not very much at all as we saw in 2007 when we had fires show up in areas that had already burned into 2003 and we only had four years of vegetation growth so we know that that wind can really carry almost regardless of how much fuel there is that wind dominated fire is common in southern california with the fuel dominated systems we've really seen the impacts of fire suppression and forest management um you might be thinking about fires that are going on right now um and some of the ones that are fuel dominated are fires like the creek fire that had that massive plume because it was consuming so much biomass so many trees dead trees dead and down material um just a lot there available to burn other fires like the north complex or the august complex that has now broken the state record at the time cedar fire was held the record like this is not a competition you want to be in but we were number one for a while and now we were down to number eight because a number of fires almost every year we are breaking records we've broken numerous records this year with the august complex burning over one million acres that's four times the size of the cedar fire and if you were around during that time i remember going out into the field that sunday the fire started on on saturday and i remember going out into the field and hearing over the radio it had crossed the 15 and the 52 and the eight and i was thinking all those places are very far apart how can it have crossed all of them at once and it was because that fire was just so massive for us and if you think about being four times larger than that it's it's fairly astounding um and some of the wind dominated fires we've seen recently just this week alone we have the silverado fire and the blue ridge fire all fanned by those those strong winds that we're burning in orange county this week but earlier this this month or earlier this year we had the bobcat fire uh the el dorado fire and here right in san diego county we had the valley fire and we were really worried about how how big that fire was going to get with the santa ana winds that were predicted now there are some ecological and and i will say that these wind-dominated fires one of the other issues is that because the fuel is not so much of a component it's very much up to ignitions if we have a fire ignite it's going to take off um and so managing those ignitions is really the the key issue the ecological impacts of these are are somewhat different and for wind-dominated fires one thing that we're concerned about is vegetation type conversion what i mean is if you have fire that occurs too frequently which if something can burn any time because you just need the right amount of wind you can burn too frequently and for example that 2003 to 2007 interval that was four years for something that usually takes 30 to 50 to 100 years to recover in contrast in fuel dominated systems we often see stand replacing crown fire and that just changes the entire landscape and that can take over 100 years to recover if you lose an entire stand entire forest interestingly the cedar fire actually had both we had both a wind-dominated fire and a fuel-dominated fire and this is what that looked like so in the early part of the fire when it took off on that that sunday on that saturday evening it was under heavy winds and it it blew out to the west and to the south and it burned this whole area in orange but then several days into the fire the santa ana's let off and the onshore flow came back and what we saw was that the fire turned around and all of a sudden it was in our montane regions it was in laguna mountain it was burning up cuyamaca rancho state park it was in julian and that's when it was turned into a fuel dominant it only no longer had that santa ana wind behind it but it was consuming all the the the heavy fuel that we had in that forested environment and in particular it was spurred on by the fact that we had had fairly severe drought and a lot of tree die off prior to that time and i'll talk a little bit about about that so this was just such a striking thing for me it started spurring a lot of questions about what really happens when the landscape burns because this is a picture looking down the san diego river gorge river valley and this is what it looked like before and then all of a sudden it became this and it just looks so different this is looking from from the west side of the river gorge across to the east and it's such a major change in the landscape i wasn't used to such such large-scale fires um and such a complete change in what the landscape looked at but i think the really great thing that happened was it it created an opportunity a lot of researchers jumped into action and took the opportunity at this massive natural experiment to study what the impacts of fires were on many of the species that make up our rich biodiversity in the region so um fire doing research on the impacts of the fire on the composition of reptiles and amphibian community um looking at the bird community um the the gnat's own staff phil unit who's part of the bird and mammal um department he had just been finishing up the the san diego bird atlas and took the opportunity to revisit a number of those sites and look at how the composition had changed after fire i remember running into phil on a a road out in the back country and he was thrilled that he had just seen a green-tailed tohi and that he was seeing lazuli buntings um different species that we don't always run into when an area is unburned and i think that just highlights that from our perspective as humans fire really seems catastrophic but it's not always ecologically it doesn't have to be what's really catastrophic for us is to frequent fire in our shrublands it's that change if we have so much fire that the system can't recover that's really the problem that we're we're concerned about when we have fires that are at a healthy interval at a more natural interval that gives the landscape a chance to recover we can see such cool things like fire following plants that we see no other time pool poppies and a lot of other species um deer come out anxious to have fresh brows the fresh green up that happens after the fire we see things like kangaroo rats that are excited to have an open landscape to run through and and fresh vegetation growing and that actually gave me an opportunity to work with some additional map staff so scott tremor also in the department of birds and mammals was working with a group that had gotten some funding from a joint fire science program some colleagues at san diego state and was working with the conservation biology institute and they actually were doing a post-fire small mammal study and they also did a carnivore study and my my friend and former grad school colleague paul schutte was was doing the carnivore work looking at how the carnivore community changed after fire i was able to help do some small mammal trapping to look at how the community changed and you know we saw some some really interesting changes where in areas that hadn't burned you see species that really need that mature chaparral like california mouse maybe the pocket mouse in comparison to a whole lot more kangaroo rats or deer mice um when in the in the burned areas and in particular saw things like wood rats get hit really hard immediately but they were able to recolonize um and so i was just i was encouraged by this and inspired by this research but i had more questions because because a lot of the research was focusing on questions of how um the community had changed these different communities of species of taxonomic groups had changed and i was really interested in i was interested in how they had changed but i was also interested in how not just the community was changing but how individual behaviors were affected how that movement right it's back to the my my questions of connectivity and how animals use the landscape i was really interested in how that might change their use of the landscape not just in you know two years three years four years but on a much longer time scale what happens when the area continues to burn which species do we see that may colonize quickly may not colonize so quickly that you know skirt the edge i was really interested in some of those movement behaviors and i returned to grad school to ask some of these questions and i was fortunate to have colleagues that were watching many of these things happen and collecting data on species for other research questions who happen to have fires come by and there was an opportunity to use some of those data for my graduate research and you'll see in this series this was the santiago fire part of the 2007 firestorm and all um i'll draw your attention to this lower left-hand corner you'll watch the time stamp and you'll see some interesting things so this is up in orange county there's a coyote hanging out in a riparian area and he doesn't want anything to do with the camera so turns around and goes in the opposite direction and here we are on october 22nd at 4 50 a.m and by nine o'clock here comes the santiago fire it's amazing that this camera survived but that coyote was there not that that long before and very quickly after the fire comes as is very common in wind-driven fires it's over it's burned everything and it's all that's left is is smoke and and ash and here we are at 10 22 on october 22nd at 9 09 am and just a few days later here's a coyote i don't know if it's the same one but it just goes to show that they're still using these areas uh you know they may not disappear for a very long time especially these larger really mobile species that i've been so interested in for a lot of my a lot of my career but it's this type of thing that that has drove some of the questions that i was interested in in asking and in particular i think one of the questions is how do these animals respond to this dynamic environment in such a constrained place so it's not just that they have to contend with fire but they're dealing with fire in a place that's highly urbanized and many of these species are avoiding the urbanization they move around to avoid human activity and avoid interacting with people and so that was really what drove a lot of my dissertation research and i'll show you a few quick things that resulted out of that but i was really fortunate to use a bunch of movement data to really understand movement behaviors and home ranges and how um species were were responding to this burn landscape not just in that short time period but in much larger time period much longer time period and so these were some of the results that i had out of my dissertation research so i was able to focus on mountain lions for one aspect and i created what i was calling a preference index so along the bottom here you'll see each of these is an individual animal because they all do very different things i mean this is really kind of the astounding thing they're all doing very different things in part because of where they are but it may also be things that they're able to take advantage of resources that they have skills that they've learned from a parent teaching them to hunt different types of of prey species but what you see here is anything below the line indicates uh a sort of an avoidance of burned areas whereas anything above the line indicates a sort of preference for the burned area and what you'll see is in that initial time period in the first year after the fire most of the cats are more or less avoiding the area but then come about two to five years after you see a bit of selection going on where more of the animals are hanging out well when you start thinking about a carnivore what is it that they eat well it's those deer they like the deer deer like the fresh browse that comes up after a fire and so it's likely that this is a response in part to what their price species is doing and then when you get out to about six to 15 years post fire which is what i sort of think of as the landscape starting to recover you've got a decent amount of cover vegetation cover there's good places to hide um things start to return to normal although clearly you've got two individuals doing something altogether different but just one interesting way to look at it and we did the same thing with bobcat and we saw a very different signal and it was so cool to connect this back to that small mammal research i had helped participate in with that the knot had had been a part of um and what we see here is a much stronger avoidance and for a longer period of time it's it's one to three years um is the red in this case and there's a much stronger avoidance of the burned areas except for a few individuals um really avoiding that that the first few years of fire and then there's a little bit of preference a little bit of avoidance it's after that after six years it just seems to sort of peter out and it just seems to be them going about using the landscape as they had before well if you think about what what bobcats eat in comparison to mountain lions they're eating a lot of those species they can't get hit very hard in the fire they eat rabbits um squirrels a lot of smaller mammals um and if they if those small mammals don't have burrows to hide in they're often caught up in the fire front and they don't survive and so that means it takes a while for that prey base to recover one thing that i was thinking about so as i mentioned we have this issue or this concern about vegetation type conversion in our region and that was one question that i wanted to add on to this piece of what is sort of the long what are the long-term ramifications on individuals and individual movements and behaviors i wanted to think more about fire return interval departure so when i say fire return interval it's really just what is the period between fires and in chaparral we think it's somewhere between 15 30 50 upwards of 100 years it depends really on the exact type of chaparral and the vegetation compo components of the community but it's it's variable but it's it's not a short turnaround it takes it takes a while to come back um but what happens if those fires are more frequent like i pointed out earlier that four year interval what does that do well one example is this area in orange and red here this is the san diego river and you'll notice that it's in orange and red and that's 34 to 66 more frequent or 67 and 99 more frequent so that just means if the average time is is 30 years we're that much more frequent we're a third to two-thirds to 100 more frequent and what that indicates is that there's potential for type conversion there's potential to shift from what is what was traditionally or historically a shrubland environment to something that's more grassland our non-native annual grasses come in they invade and they change the whole landscape and so i was also interested in asking some questions about how that affects species and their movement because it's not just the immediate effect of the fire but what happens to a bobcat that tends to avoid burned areas in the first few years because their prey base disappears what happens if we're constantly in that early successional state if we're having fire after fire and the whole system changes and some of you may know that when we shift to a grassland-dominated system it turns into a feedback loop so fires become more and more frequent because that grass is lighter flashier fuel it's easier to ignite and it's easier for fire to spread now it burns more quickly but you sort of the consequence has already occurred and it can really again just enhance that whole cycle of making fires more and more frequent and so overall i've been kind of interested in what this does to our that biodiversity in our region we know for example the hermes copper butterfly here at the top um is a species that uh we've we've seen some extirpation of um local populations because of fires um we haven't necessarily seen recolonization of those areas and it could impart some of it's just the fire itself but it could in part be that the vegetation community doesn't come back they need host plants the spiny red berry they need nectarine plants like buckwheat and those don't always come back when you've burned too frequently we know for example the cactus ren they need cactus to nest in and those aren't always coming back after fire especially when you're having repeated fire and there's been some efforts to do cactus restoration the california nat catcher our iconic san diego species that has driven a lot of our conservation action in the san diego river we've lost a number of nesting sites um because of frequent fire those areas are constantly in a state of change and the vegetation that the net catcher needs to nest has has disappeared and finally another example i wanted to highlight is is the red-legged frog some of you may have read about the actions that have been taken the santa monica mountains has has been doing a a project to restore red-legged frogs to some of the streams in their in their region and they had a great prog head starting program going on releasing red-legged frogs and then they had massive fire and what comes after massive fire is often erosion the first rains come and sedimentation just piles into the creek and the whole creek gets filled well if you're an aquatic species or you're you're an amphibian with your eggs in that water um that can be a death now and there was a an effort i think recently and i believe the nat staff brad hollingsworth and colleagues were part of that with usgs to go and get some additional red-legged frog eggs from populations south of the border and see if they could get some of them those populations um going up here to to infuse our our populations that are at risk but i've been talking a lot about this you know i mentioned that we've got the wind driven and the fuel driven and i've been talking a lot about how we see change in this landscape with the fuel driven i mean with the wind driven fires but the we also have seen the fuel-driven fires here as i mentioned that happened during the cedar fire um this photo at the top is from the 2013 um chariot fire and there's a whole different circumstance that's going on this is the other this is the other part of our back country it's it's it's not the dominant vegetation it's not the dominant issue but it plays a really important part of san diego's biodiversity and if i show this map again the areas that i didn't focus so much on the yellows to the greens are areas when we have where we have less frequent fire so it seems maybe confusing or conflicting to have areas that are burning too much in areas that are burning not enough but you know all of these are our problems for us that we need to address in san diego and it just makes for much more complicated land management but you'll see these areas that are green that are not burning frequently enough happen to be our mountains here's laguna mountain oops you can't see my mouse here we go here's laguna mountain and we've got palomar mountain san jacinto san bernardino san gabriel all of those areas those are all our montane regions and they're not burning frequently enough and in fact if you look to some some a recent paper that was put out by forest service scientists you can see that this uh graph at the or the colors at the top here represent time since fire and you can see a lot of it in those forested areas are red and that means it's been 80 to 100 years since fire in in many of those places we've got some areas in the green but not quite enough and if you look at it in a different way i lost my mouse again here we go if you look at it in a different way um we've got the the four different national forests cleveland san bernardino angeles and then the los padres uh south and north on this graph here you'll see that the percent of area that has burned only once or twice it's the vast majority of area on these in these forested landscapes across those those different national forests only the los padres has burned more frequently than that since 1908 and that's a really long time that might seem like that's okay because i was just talking about chaparral like the normal interview is something like 30 or 50 or 100 years so what is it for forested landscapes well i was fortunate fortunate enough to have the opportunity to work with some some colleagues from uc berkeley that i had worked with on the fire and fire surrogate study see all the pieces connect here it just keeps sucking me back in and they came down and did some really cool work on what's called fire scar dendrochronology and that's really what this this picture here shows is you take a a slice of the of a tree of a conifer tree and you look at the rings and you can see different scars so you can see in this example they've identified where those scars are and if you get enough samples you can sort of correlate across the across the landscape and figure out what the time since fire uh the time in between fires has been so in this image here each of these lines is a different tree that's been sampled um i helped the researchers sample from palomar mountain which is fc fry creek cuyamaca in the center here and then at the bottom mount laguna and we see you see we got a decent number of trees some of which were very old dating back to the 1600s which was was really awesome to see and once we get to about the mid to late 1700s we're able to have enough samples from a tree that we can actually assemble that fire history and you can see what's down at the bottom very bottom here is uh lines that show the frequency at which we normally see fire and you can see there's a whole lot of these lines until we get to about 1950 and they start to peter out and that's about when we started taking on the approach of full fire suppression so any fire that started the goal is to put it out as soon as possible but it wasn't really in keeping with what we think that the the fire history should be the with the fire frequency it was really anywhere between 5 to 10 to 13 years it was fairly frequent relatively small fires was what we had experienced and we just stretched that out and it it has had ecological and fire risk consequences for the region and and this is exactly what we're seeing across northern california as well in many parts of the west this wasn't just a um you know one-off strategy this is this was taken across the west for fire management and what can happen is what you see in this picture this is a picture from 2003 um from palomar mountain where we had loads of dead trees to deal with and no place to put them so we had to take on a um a project to cut a bunch of these dead trees down there was too much standing dead from the drought and what had happened was we suppressed fire for so long and the canopy shaded over and we had trees that were able to grow in in that under that shaded canopy and they just got very thick um it's white fur and and cedar trees that are able to grow under that canopy and it became so thick that that once we had a drought condition they didn't have the available water that they needed and trees started dying so now we have this very dense and partially dead forest to deal with and we had to undertake this large project to pull these trees off and please don't think that this was a logging project if you look at these trees on this landing where the bark has come off there were conchs there were fungi growing on these trees they were so dead we we almost couldn't find a way to get rid of them um because there was so much material and this was just a real challenge of how do we deal with this and it has implications for the spotted owls that should be living here or some of the cool species like the mountain king snake that you would expect to see if if we have all this dead and down material or if we have fire come in and burn through this imagine how much hotter it would rip um with all that dead material and we you know through my time with the forest service we were busy dealing with these these issues i spent time working on prescribed fires to improve forest health that a number of thinning projects to get that understory cleared out so that if fire did come it didn't get into the canopies of the trees it stayed on the ground and cleared up the ground fuels cleared up what we call ladder fuels that get into the canopy and make the fire much bigger it helps us just manage that fuel on a more regular basis we also did a lot of projects in our chaparral working with communities to try and help protect communities through a variety of of approaches and i'll talk a little bit about that at the end but i spent all that time working for the forest service but i had finished my phd and i just had a lot of visions about other things i wanted to do and so i turned my attention back to connectivity and i had spent some time working on it and developing a climate connectivity plan that would help us be more strategic about our investments in conservation but then i sat back after i'd finished that project and i looked around and i said you know i'm preaching to the choir by serving this up to folks who already believe that conservation is something we need to be doing and how can we have greater impact how can that work be more meaningful how can we bring more people into the fold to understand that there's there's a benefit of of connectivity of protecting natural spaces of protecting um biodiversity and i think the way is to think about the the other things that people are concerned about everybody has their own different perspective and set of values and and that's okay um but we have to be able to speak to those people and articulate how one type of action like conservation can benefit communities uh their well-being um how we can use strategic planning to mitigate fire risk how our natural spaces filter and and protect the water that we so desperately depend on down here in southern california so how could we put all these pieces together in a much more interdisciplinary fashion we often spend time planning for each of these things in isolation and i really wanted to try and bring the pieces together so that we could do more we could think about these benefits all together we could talk more um as a community both about how we protect our wildlands our ecological communities as well as our human communities because too often we treat them separately as as human communities are bad for ecological communities but the truth of the matter is we are inextricably linked we are here we do affect those those ecological communities and there has to be a better way to be thinking about climate adaptation and and managing these interconnected systems and so with that we took on the connecting wildlands and communities project and you may have heard about this i we spent quite a bit of time working with people across our communities in southern california to get the word out about this and to learn from people about what they what kind of information and data they need and the idea here is really to be planning for climate-ready landscapes to think about how conservation can benefit our communities and our wildlands and you can see as i mentioned we've sort of got these three main components we're focused on fire we're focused on water we're focused on biodiversity but not just in isolation we want to put the pieces together as you see sort of in the towards the bottom of the screen and the idea here is to work with across the top at the arch here you see a lot of the different types of communities we're trying to deliver this this this messaging and these the data and science to it's about being more strategic in all the different types of work that we do thinking about what the multiple benefits are of protecting this of protecting both our wildlands and our human communities and and thinking about them together and really one of the most important places where we've been focusing our energy is in planning integration thinking about how local jurisdictions plan how maybe some of them are involved in conservation but but maybe not all of them are and they are making decisions about land use about fire risk about water management and how can having a more complete picture help be more strategic now we as i as you can see we have a whole separate fire team and i want to acknowledge them all now many are at san diego state doug stowe emanuel story krista west doing fantastic research if you know anything about fire in san diego you know about alexandra seifert she's an amazing researcher she's now she's been with the conservation biology institute for a number of years she's now working with an underwriting company to use her vast knowledge of fire and fire ecology to help inform decisions about fire and fire management and then finally my colleague aaron conlisk who's with point blue conservation science and they've been working on some really fantastic products data to inform planning and management thinking about where do we have vulnerability to drought that we need to be planning for that might create areas of fire risk or experience ecological degradation and so they've been developing data on that front where do we see herbaceous cover change i keep talking about that vegetation type conversion where we see a change from shrublands to grasslands how can we identify where those areas are now as soon as possible and do work to maybe restore or prevent further ignitions in those areas to help prevent the the negative ecological consequences of that change but also to tie it back to thinking about fire risk as i mentioned grasses are lighter flashier fuels that can contribute to fire risk for our communities so these pieces are inextricably linked and we want to treat them as such um and just thinking about things like looking at where fires are and and how we're recovering from fires so if you're looking at this you're probably thinking this sounds a lot like it's focused on the the wind driven fire parts of our our system are our shrublands and it is but never fear we have more work coming because because we just don't stop and this just seems to be a a big stone that's rolling down the hill and all the pieces are coming together and it's just so fantastic so i i can't get away from the forest service i keep coming back for more and was able to connect with colleagues who saw the issue of what's going on in our forests and and have identified a really strong need to cut for group to come together to develop a climate and form conservation strategy for how we manage these forests and this is really about building collaboration um a foundation of knowledge that everyone can work work from people coming from different management perspectives and backgrounds to really establish a community of practice and so the great thing is that the forest service will be leading this work because they are the manager of a lot of the forested lands in southern california but um and they're funded by the southwest climate adaptation science center but they've brought us on um myself from the scent from san diego state university as well as my colleagues from the climate science alliance because we've just spent so much time working on these strong stakeholder connections this um really meaningful approach to working with communities asking what people need to know making sure that we're listening making sure that we're delivering data in a way that can really help make decisions that can influence the way that we we go about doing things by making sure science is at the forefront by making sure that the data are there to support the decisions that we're making so we're really excited we're just kicking this project off now we haven't even had a meeting yet we'll be doing that in december if you're interested in this stay tuned because the community will be a part of this as well but i'm just really excited to have the opportunity to use all that that time and experience i spent working on forest health and forest management for the forest service to bring it back and connect to these other aspects of research that i've focused on and really the idea behind this is to make sure that we're thinking about protecting the values that come out of our forests our forests provide a lot of services it's all about sort of articulating those benefits i was talking about before things like carbon sequestration and wildlife habitat and corridors and protecting water watershed the aesthetic and spiritual connections our forests are very important for our local tribal communities indigenous people who those were their ancestral lands they still are but they're now managed by a different agency and making sure they have an opportunity to help protect the land that they were stewards of for for time immemorial and it's also very important for recreational opportunities right what is everybody doing this pandemic aside from feeling cooped up our one opportunity to get out there is to experience nature and i think we've seen a surge in that hopefully that increases the appreciation but these forests are at risk um we've seen rapid warming um you know persistent long-term droughts i talked about the impacts of that on on our own mountains here we've seen variable precipitation and pollution but really the fire issue is a big one as well as well as in invasive species the gold spotted oak borer has decimated a lot of our native oak population and we probably need to undertake restoration to to bring those those populations back so we actually have um good strong healthy oak populations in the future and so there's a lot of opportunity i think to work on turning these these thicker um more dense forests into something that's this one just makes me cringe because i think about what it's like to be out here um you know it took it took over 100 years to make this problem and we're not going to fix it overnight but you know there are a lot of tools we have at our disposal there's no quick fixes but collaboration is really going to be the best way that we move forward on on doing better with protecting and conserving our montana forests and it's a key part of assembling this whole comprehensive strategy as you can see from what i'm talking about these are all separate projects because it's really hard to tackle everything in san diego we're so diverse our ecological communities our species just having the communities that we have it makes it complex but it makes it really interesting and exciting it certainly keeps me moving and keeps me interested there's always something more to do and i'm i feel so privileged to have the opportunity to be able to work on this and in particular work on it with such great colleagues who who want to move forward and do great work so you know hopefully with this strategy we'll have more opportunities for making the forest healthier restoring burning as i mentioned also hopefully restoring some of the cultural practices of burning you can see the deer grass here that's a culturally important species for our local tribal communities um kumiyai cupeno luiseno these are all really the forests were very important um and still are to their their culture and identity and making sure that they have an opportunity to be part of the conservation solution and conservation conversation because it's not just about ecology it's about culture and life and identity so making sure that perhaps cultural burning is part of and you may have heard about this other parts of the state this is a big part of our conversation about how do we restore forest health in this in this state and part of it is by looking to the folks who were stewards of this land for for many many centuries and to learn what they have to say about how we do that so that hopefully we can bring back fire to the landscape safely and have more resilient forests so before i end i just wanted to touch on a few things because you can't have a fire talk without sort of thinking about well well what can we do and how are we you know we're we're at the center of this we people are at the center of this what can we do and what can we do to protect wildlands and communities well in wind dominated fuel systems or fire systems like our chaparral and troublin systems we address it with the five ps which john keeley and alex seifert came up with and it's really about people prevention planning protection and prediction it's about trying to avoid these impacts in the first place trying to avoid more starts trying to be strategic in our land use planning trying to to limit the number of fires that we see on the landscape in contrast in our fuel dominated systems we want to think about this by addressing um the the need to restore forest health and that's going to come you know it got this way after a long period of time but it's going to take some pretty intensive action to put things back in a more natural state so that's going to be fuels treatments understory thinning probably prescribed fire you know you saw some examples of things i was talking about earlier and i think it's just really important to to mention that we are at the heart of this problem we do not have natural ignitions in this in this part of the world um very often um lightning is a is a little bit of it as you see on this graph but by and large it's equipment and power lines and you'll see um this is area burned in black and and gray is the number of fires but um you can see not very many fires with power lines but you know when the winds start blowing the power lines start moving and arcing you know sdg e has done a fantastic job of trying to predict um wind and turn off power to limit limit fire starts and have been really proactive but it doesn't mean that it doesn't happen and and it can spread really fast and the equipment um you know we can do better there's more that we can do to limit those starts and you may be thinking well what can you an individual do and i think one of the first things is thinking about reducing ignitions where do they come from i used to sit at a desk in the forest service next to a radio base station and i could hear beep beep beep vegetation fire and then they would come out and it would turn out it would be somebody using a weed whacker on a red flag day because they panicked and they used a metal bladed weed whacker and they struck a rock and ignited a fire being proactive about doing clearance and and not waiting until the red flag event comes is a great way to start um supporting fire safe planning making sure that your community plans are thinking about fire safety and making land use decisions that don't put more homes in in the path of fire um protecting homes working from the structure out and i just wanted to share this great graphic from alex seifert and john keely where here we are on the right hand side in southern california and you'll notice that there's three things that really made the difference this this study was about what factors determined whether a structure burned or not and the three ones that were most common in southern california were if they had done work to protect eaves to protect vent screens and window panes fire structures were less likely to have burned well what does that really mean let's see here there we go um it means that we have to think about pathways for embers first and foremost um the reason that those components of the structure are so important is that when the blend is blowing and the fire is going embers are flying and you don't have to be anywhere near that fire for a structure to burn so really thinking about that when you're working on fire safety at your home it's also important to think about creating defensible space so in other words that 100 foot clearance that's required by the county for firefighter safety i'm married to a firefighter or a former firefighter so it's important to think about those people i worked with them for many years and you know defensible space doesn't mean clearing down to bare mineral soil or you know planting ice plant that has resource implications you know it's not good for our ecological communities it could just mean green vegetation it can mean picking safer plants that aren't as fire prone um so you know there are ways to do this um to to protect your home and to protect firefighters but to do it in a way that we consider biodiversity and natural resource resources in our fire protection measures and that's really a lot of the work i did for the forest service was was walking that type of rope thinking about that very careful balance between fire risk and safety and protecting the reach biodiversity and natural resources we have here in san diego because we just have such a rich place that we are fortunate enough to experience and it's worth protecting and it's complex but it's not impossible and hopefully with the research that we're doing it'll help make it easier because we'll have plans and we'll have science behind us so with that i have a couple of websites to share i hope that you visit them if you have interest in any of the projects i've been talking about i'm happy to field questions via email but i look forward to taking your questions hopefully you've typed some into the q a box well thank you very much megan that was a fascinating talk and chock full of information

Channel: SDNaturalHistory

Views: 17

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: san diego natural history museum, natural history, museum, san diego, The Nat, wild fire, wildfire

Id: QxJ2KT6KZII

Length: 52min 5sec (3125 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 18 2020