A lecture on “Climate, Fire, Salamanders, and Forests: Through the Lens of Tree Rings”
The Las Conchas fire was the biggest in state history when it burned more than 150,000 acres in 2011. But looking back into the centuries, it’s less outstanding, except for its destructive force. “Our preliminary data shows that the footprint, the total area burned, was not extraordinary,” Ellis Margolis said. “There were larger fires historically, but they were cooler and didn’t kill the trees.”
Margolis is a staffer with Santa Fe’s New Mexico Landscapes Field Station, a satellite of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Fort Collins Science Center. He gives a free talk, “Climate, Fire, Salamanders, and Forests: Through the Lens of Tree Rings,” at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 17, at Christ Lutheran Church. Margolis has worked with decades of treering data to reconstruct fire history in the Santa Fe, Taos, and Jemez watersheds. “People have been collecting tree-ring fire scars: evidence of old fires that show in the tree rings. There’s a 40-year history, and we claim that the Jemez is the most densely sampled mountain range in North America. The goal is to reconstruct the area burned, which is 600,000-plus acres, to look at how big fires were historically. Our record goes back into the 1600s.”
In the 19th century, livestock interrupted the cycle of frequent, cooler fires. “Historically the fires were just burning grass, so when the sheep came in and ate all the grass, there was nothing to burn,” Margolis said. “We see fires actually stopped in this area in the late 1800s because that’s when the railroad brought a lot of livestock in.” Then, starting in the 1940s, Smokey Bear’s mission to suppress all forest fires resulted in the buildup of brush and dead tree material that served as explosive fuel when big fires did occur.
Even those big ones can’t kill quaking aspen, which is “kind of the classic phoenix tree,” Margolis said. “Those big aspen stands up on the ski hill that everyone loves are all from big fires. Aspen gets shaded out when the conifers grow tall enough, but if you burn it, it will resprout from its root stock because it’s clonal. There are huge root networks. In the Jemez after Las Conchas, the aspens are very happy. They’re growing all over the place.”
The Margolis talk is presented by the Santa Fe chapter of the Native Plant Society of New Mexico. Christ Lutheran Church is at 1701 Arroyo Chamiso Road. For more information, call 505-690-5105. — Paul Weideman