Researchers paint bleak picture of forest fires beyond 2030

 The devastating fire seasons plaguing California’s Sierra Nevada may be a thing of the past after 2030, and that has scientists worried.

Their main concern? The area might not have enough trees left by the next decade.

A study published this past week in the journal Ecosphere suggests that dry mountain forests in California and other Western states will likely see ever-worsening fires for the next decade, followed by a period of fewer fires with less intensity.

Between now and then, wildfires turbocharged by climate change are expected to dramatically alter the landscape, leaving less fuel for blazes just 10 years from now, according to the study.

Researchers looked at the Big Creek watershed in the Sierra Nevada, near the source of a 2020 fire that burned 78,000 acres and destroyed much of a nearby town. Their goal was to get a better sense of whether the massive forest fires in recent years would become permanent in California. In order to do so, they had to build a simulation that could essentially predict what wildfires would look like years from now.

Their eventual model was adopted last week by the California Air and Resources Board to use in projecting the long-term impacts of fire on the California landscape.

What the researchers found in their study was that the Big Creek watershed near Fresno, if left alone, was going to pulse in a spasm of repeated fires over the next decade, by which point it would have blasted through enough of the large fuel on the landscape that — in combination with climate change — the land would no longer be hospitable to fire...MORE