Recent US Wildfires are burning record amounts of acreage and are becoming increasingly expensive – currently, about $3 billion a year in federal funds. Santa Barbara County alone has experienced five major fires in the last 2 years: the Zaca Fire, which broke out on July 4, 2007; the Gap Fire, which began July 1, 2008; the Tea Fire, which started November 13, 2008; the Jesusita Fire that erupted on May 5, 2009; and the La Brea Fire that originated on August 7, 2009.
The national trend towards increasing area burned is largely due to the unnatural accumulation of fuels due to fire suppression, logging, and other factors. However, Santa Barbara County is dominated by “chaparral” wildland. “Chaparral is a shrubland or heathland plant community found primarily in the U.S. state of California and in the northern portion of the Baja California peninsula, Mexico. It is shaped by a Mediterranean climate (mild, wet winters and hot dry summers) and wildfire…The word chaparral is a loan word from Spanish. The Spanish word comes from the word chaparro, which means both small and dwarf evergreen oak, which itself comes from the Basque word txapar, with the same meaning. A typical chaparral plant community consists of densely-growing evergreen scrub oaks and other drought-resistant shrubs. It often grows so densely that it is all but impenetrable to large animals and humans. This, and its generally arid condition, makes it notoriously prone to wildfires” (Wikipedia).
Fire in chaparral is different from fire in forested areas. Large chaparral fires are more dependent on weather conditions than fuel conditions. For instance, the southern California firestorms of 2003 and 2007 were accelerated by Santa Ana winds and burned hundreds of thousands of acres. They are not without precedent – the 1889 Santiago Canyon Fire, which burned for three days under Santa Ana wind conditions, is likely the largest fire in the history of the state.
The recent Santa Barbara fires have destroyed hundreds of homes, burned thousands of acres, and have cost millions of dollars to fight. Why? Here are some of the reasons:
- More and more people are living in the wildland-urban interface—which increases both the number of ignitions and potential property damage. Most chaparral wildfires, and all five recent, large Santa Barbara County wildfires, were of human origin.
- California is currently in a three year drought. Most wildland fires primarily burn through dead vegetation, but chaparral fires are dependent upon living shrubs for fuel, which burn more readily when the vegetation is dry. The 2007 Zaca Fire grew so large because live fuel moisture was the driest it had been since record keeping began in 1981. 2008 was also a particularly dry year. The Jesusita Fire burned under high live fuel moisture conditions, which likely led to less property loss than if the fire had occurred later in the year.
Wildfire is important to the Earth’s carbon cycle, because it restores carbon removed from the atmosphere by vegetation that uses carbon dioxide to produce organic matter via photosynthesis. Chaparral vegetation is adapted to and dependent on wildfire—fire triggers the release of seeds, stimulates flowering, increases soil nutrients, and reduces competition from plants not adapted to fire. The return interval of wildfire in chaparral ecosystems is highly variable: probably between 30 and hundreds of years. We can’t stop wildfires from occurring. But we can learn to live with them and their effects on the landscape.
Because three of these recent fires (Gap, Tea, and Jesusita) burned within the Santa Barbara Coastal LTER (long term ecological research) site, researchers from several departments/schools across campus (including Geography, EEMB, Bren, and Environmental Studies) are collaborating to study the effects of these fires on our terrestrial, riparian, stream, and coastal ecosystems. The proposed research will track sediment transport overland and through streams, as well as vegetation recovery, and is especially important given that El Nino conditions, which may result in high winter rainfall, are expected this year.
Fire-related research is a long standing interest of Professor Dar Roberts and his graduate students in his Visualization and Image Processing of Environmental Resources Laboratory, or VIPER Lab, for short. Aside from the above-mentioned LTER proposal, Seth Peterson’s research interests include mapping live fuel moisture and fuel amount, which correspond to fire risk. Keely Roth is interested in if/how the timing of the fires (early season vs. late season) will impact plant phenology and thus, the species distribution of recovering vegetation. Other members of the VIPER Lab are studying methane plumes from natural and anthropogenic sources (Eliza Bradley and Andrew Thorpe) and agricultural crop type and yield in Brazil (Michael Toomey).
The mission of the Department of Geography is to build an extraordinary community for creating new knowledge about planet earth and its inhabitants, to create new methods and models to advance geographic information science, and to use integrated science to better understand spatio-temporal dynamics. Inherent in this mission is a commitment to share this knowledge with others to solve problems. The research carried out in the VIPER lab (not to mention the entire Department) exemplifies this mission and commitment, insofar as Santa Barbara firefighters and planners depend on the geographic information provided by such experts in GIS, remote sensing, and environmental research.
Editor’s note: Many thanks to Keely and Seth for major contributions to this article.
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