Post by @Nonilex@masto.ai

Bigger, Hotter #Fires Are Slowly Erasing America’s Great #Forests

Towering woodlands in the West are being permanently replaced by tracts of spiky shrubs. Conditions “just aren’t normal anymore,” one researcher said.

#wildfires #ExtremeWeather #heat #drought #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/23/climate/wildfire-forest-loss-california-southwest.html?unlocked_article_code=1.7lA.SOvU.Ny-fp850p9G6&smid=nytcore-ios-share

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#fires #giftarticle #drought #extremeweather #wildfires #heat #forests #climatechange #climatecrisis

3 Replies

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Oliver Brendel

@olibrendel@scicomm.xyz 2 hr. ago

@Nonilex well #giftarticle does not seem to work, still need to login to read ..

Oliver Brendel

@olibrendel@scicomm.xyz 33 min. ago

@Nonilex so here is a text extract :
Spiky shrubs and poison oak have replaced the majestic trees. All that is left of the pines are burned logs and dead branches.

It’s part of a wider transformation that’s taking place across the Western United States, from Oregon to New Mexico, as bigger and hotter wildfires sweep through forests that have not evolved to survive such high-intensity blazes and a warmer climate. Recent studies estimate that as much as 40 percent of Western conifer forests will turn into shrubland by 2100 as a result. https://www-nature-com.bnf.idm.oclc.org/articles/s43247-024-01253-6
“This is a permanent shift from one ecosystem type to a fundamentally different one,” said Winslow Hansen, a forest ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, an independent research center in Millbrook, N.Y.
Researchers say that as trees disappear, winter and spring snow will melt faster, affecting wildlife as well as communities that are already struggling with water shortages. Some Western states get as much as 75 percent of their water from snowmelt.

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Oliver Brendel

@olibrendel@scicomm.xyz 31 min. ago

@Nonilex
As natural regeneration falters, scientists and conservationists are trying to give forests a helping hand.

In Montana, for example, they’re teaming up to plant more climate-resistant seedlings from lower and warmer elevations in new areas that have burned. Kimberley Davis, a research ecologist at the U.S. Forest Service in Missoula, Mont., worked with The Nature Conservancy, a nonprofit environmental group based in Arlington, Va., at an experiment in the western part of the state.

They took seedlings of the western larch, a native conifer that can reach 200 feet tall, from 3,400 feet and planted them in a burned area between 4,600 feet and 6,200 feet. The lower-elevation seedlings grew back better and coped with the warmer climate better than seedlings taken from higher elevations. Similar experiments of so-called assisted migration are underway in California and Washington State.

“Keeping as many live trees as we can on the landscape when it burns is really important,” Dr. Davis said. “Because the seed source is so important.”