Decrease Wildfire Risks by Choosing the Right Plants

From the USDA:

Posted by Ciji Taylor, Natural Resources Conservation Service, on November 21, 2014 at 11:04 AM

A grass fire burns across eastern Washington.

Land begins to recover one year after emergency reseeding following the Los Alamos fires in New Mexico. Some of the species planted for erosion control and habitat improvement were prairie junegrass, slender wheatgrass, mountain brome, three awn, gambel's oak and mountain mahogany.

Traveling at speeds up to 14 mph, wildfires can quickly ravish landscapes and homesteads. Experts with USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, (NRCS) are studying what plants can slow fire rather than fuel it. 

NRCS’ Plant Materials Centers evaluate and study plants, including those that can reduce fire damage or losses, helping keep people, property and natural resources safe. These centers, located across the United States, can provide information on the type plant best suited for an area given factors such as geography and climate.

“All plants burn, but using the right management and plant materials gives you a better chance of lessening damage,” said Jim Jacobs, NRCS plant materials specialist for Montana and Wyoming. 

“Weather, topography and fuels dictate fire behavior,” Jacobs said. “A landowner can only control the type and amount of plant fuels, so the focus should be on managing what you can manage.” 

A perimeter or firebreak of about 30 feet should be created around homes and other buildings. This area can be created by planting low-stature grasses or perennial herbaceous plants and shrubs. Plants in the 30-foot area should be kept green, since green plants don’t burn as hot and can buffer buildings from the heat’s intensity. Plant maintenance is an important preventive step.  Pruning trees and shrubs, mowing, and keeping dead material out of the perimeter will decrease fuel load around structures. 

If planting trees, they should be planted far enough away that their canopy doesn’t grow within 10 feet of a building. Trees that hold more moisture are better than trees containing resin, such as pines, because they won’t burn as fast or as hot. Trees can also help block heat, slow wind and intercept embers, which are the main causes of structural fires and costliest part of wildfires.

In shelterbelts and wind breaks, farmers and ranchers should work to reduce what’s known as ladder fuels or plants that enable fire to climb from the ground into canopies. Keeping fires out of tree canopies helps reduce the number of embers in the air.

“Wildfires race across fields, so farmers and ranchers don’t have time to react,” Jacobs said. “At that point, it’s left to the preparation and management of your plant materials to help protect you and your structures.”

On wild lands, low- and moderate-intensity ground fires actually help forests by rejuvenating understory growth. But high-intensity fires can kill the entire plant leaving the soil bare, which increases the chances of erosion and flash flooding. In order to stabilize the soil and provide food and shelter for wildlife, landowners should reseed with grasses that establish quickly.

The Plant Materials Center in Aberdeen, Idaho is supporting post-fire reseeding management by providing foundation seeds to the commercial seed industry. These foundation seeds come from plants that are evaluated to ensure establishment and performance under specific conditions, such as post fire. 

“Firefighters aren’t our only defense to fires. Simply by using the right plants and management, we’re dispatching another type of preventive firefighter,” Jacobs said. 

Several guides and resources on planning homes and landscapes are available on the NRCS website and your local NRCS field office.

Jointly Developed Watershed Assessment Model Being Used in Yosemite National Park

USDA Blog Post:

Posted by Tara T. Weaver-Missick, USDA-Agricultural Research Service Information Staff, on December 3, 2013 at 3:00 PM

Bridalveil Falls, Yosemite National Park, California (USDA-NRCS photo by Ron Nichols).

This post is part of the Science Tuesday feature series on the USDA blog. Check back each week as we showcase stories and news from USDA’s rich science and research portfolio.

An award-winning watershed assessment tool, the Automated Geospatial Watershed Assessment (AGWA), was deployed to assess potential Rim Fire threats in Yosemite National Park in California.  The park experienced a devastating fire that began on August 17, 2013, and took several months to contain. The fire burned more than 400 square miles in and around the park, cost $125.8 million to date, and is considered one of the largest wildfires in California’s history.

BAER (Burned Area Emergency Response) is a multi-agency group that includes USDA’s Forest Service and others, and is responsible for identifying potential threats such as downstream flooding and developing plans to rehabilitate and restore burned areas. BAER teams use AGWA to target immediate efforts to prevent threats to people, wildlife and the land.  Using AGWA combined with the burn severity map produced by BAER teams, experts can rapidly pull together information on pre- and post-fire conditions. For example, knowing where to apply mulch after a fire can reduce runoff and erosion and can help minimize downstream risks from fire induced land cover and soil changes.

AGWA has already been successfully used for post-fire BAER team watershed assessments following fires in Arizona, New Mexico, California, Idaho and Washington.  AGWA was jointly developed by scientists with the USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS) Southwest Watershed Research Center in Tucson, AZ, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Universities of Arizona and Wyoming.

ARS researchers and their partners originally developed the computer model as a multipurpose computer system and software tool designed for managing and analyzing water quantity and quality to help keep our Nation’s watersheds cleaner. AGWA uses nationally available data sources to rapidly establish and execute results from two ARS-developed watershed models, the Kinematic Runoff and Erosion Model (KINEROS2) and the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT).  It enables the user to visualize and compare model results to understand the impact of a certain practice on a given landscape.

How we manage activities that take place on crop production areas, rangelands, pastures, forests, meadows, and urban areas influences the quantity and quality of water available for domestic, industrial, agricultural and ecological uses. You can learn more about AGWA at www.tucson.ars.ag.gov/agwa.

Secretary's Column: Taking New Steps to Care for the Land and Water

USDA Blog Post:

Posted by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, on September 13, 2013 at 3:00 PM

Natural resource conservation is paramount to the ongoing strength of our nation. Healthy soil contributes to agricultural productivity. Healthy forests clean our water and air. Vibrant waterways are critical for our health, for transportation and for trade. Investments into conservation spur job growth and community development, particularly in rural areas.

This is an uncertain time for USDA conservation activities. Congress has not yet passed a comprehensive Food, Farm and Jobs Bill that would continue to invest in conservation efforts, while providing rural America with certainty regarding many other important programs.

As we continue urging Congress to provide a new Food, Farm and Jobs Bill, USDA this week took several new steps to strengthen conservation across the country.

We invested in innovation by awarding new grants under USDA’s Conservation Innovation Grants program.  New technologies and tactics are constantly emerging that help producers and landowners care for the environment.  These 33 new awards will help organizations across the country carry out advanced new conservation strategies and share them with producers. For example, several projects will investigate the benefits of cover crops, which could help producers grow more while mitigating the impacts of a changing climate.

These new project awards are part of more than 260 projects funded since 2009, including a special group of Conservation Innovation Grants to help agriculture adapt to drought.

We also invested this week in the future of renewable energy from wood products. USDA announced a partnership with industry to work toward additional wood-to-energy projects, while awarding more than $1 million in grants for five statewide teams that will further develop these efforts.  This builds on past work that has resulted in more than 230 wood-to-energy projects created under the Obama Administration.

Advanced wood energy provides a wide range of benefits for our nation. It encourages forest restoration by providing a new way to use wood byproducts. It contributes to an “all-of-the above” energy strategy, giving folks an alternative to costly energy sources. And it helps to create good jobs in energy and forestry for rural Americans. Renewable wood energy holds tremendous promise for rural America, and the new investments made this week are yet another step forward for this technology.

To cap off a week of positive new developments for USDA conservation efforts, we announced today that the U.S. Forest Service will partner with Coca-Cola, the National Forest Foundation and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation in a long-term effort to restore and clean waterways in our National Forests.

National Forests provide drinking water for more than 60 million Americans – and working together, USDA and Coca-Cola will undertake a range of projects in the coming years to restore forest waterways. These include working on the Angeles National Forest in California to prevent erosion caused by wildfire; restoring a stream in New Mexico that was previously impacted by industrial activity; and enhancing waterways within the Lake Michigan watershed.

Our hope is that these restoration projects will stand as an example for the benefit of public-private partnership to deliver results for the American people, even in a time of tighter budgets.

These new efforts complement the wide range of work we will continue to do with a focus on delivering record conservation results for Americans. With the right tools, including a new Food, Farm and Jobs Bill, there is much more we can achieve in the years to come.

Our Forests and Climate Change

USDA Blog Post:

Posted by Robert Bonnie, Under Secretary of Agriculture for Natural Resources and the Environment and Anne Castle, Assistant Secretary for Water & Science at the Department of the Interior, on September 12, 2013 at 10:45 AM

Cross posted from the White House Council on Environmental Quality blog:

Americans know the importance of forests to our communities and our economy.  They provide jobs and recreational opportunities, filter our air and water, and make up essential habitat for wildlife and natural resources.  But increasingly, we’re also recognizing that forests play an important role in mitigating climate change.

Recently, President Obama announced a Climate Action Plan to reduce carbon pollution, prepare for the impacts of climate change on our communities and economy, and lead international efforts to combat global climate change. This plan recognizes that America’s forests play a critical role in addressing carbon pollution, absorbing as much as 14 percent of our country’s greenhouse gas emissions each year.  Over the last several decades, forest regrowth on former farm lands, reforestation, and maturing forests have kept our forest growth rates high, helping us absorb even more carbon.

At the same time, development of forest lands is reducing the amount of carbon we can absorb now and in the future.  Carbon pollution is also taking a toll on our forests – heat waves, wildfires, pests and drought are all worsened by climate change, reducing our forests’ ability to sequester carbon.

It is difficult to predict precisely how much these impacts will reduce the potential of our forests to combat climate change – but we do know that we must start now to find new ways to enhance forests’ ability to absorb carbon and become more resilient. As part of the President’s Climate Action Plan, the Administration is bringing Federal agencies together to tackle this challenge.  An interagency Task Force is working to provide more accurate and consistent annual updates of carbon fluxes from forests and other lands.  This will help us ensure that we have up-to-date information on how major disturbances like wildfires, as well as land development trends, impact the capacity of the nation’s forests to absorb carbon. It will also provide the tools we need to make more effective policy decisions, ensuring land managers are able to take into account the carbon sequestration value of our forests.   The Task Force is also developing new approaches to retain and restore our forests and other important landscapes like grasslands and wetlands.

This initiative will build on the significant work the Administration already has underway to ensure healthy, thriving forests. For example, the Department of Agriculture announced this year the creation of seven new regional hubs to provide research and timely information to farmers and forest landowners as we work together to combat climate change. This work will complement research by DOI Climate Science Centers, in areas such as evaluating management options, projecting forest conditions and carbon storage under climate change, evaluating the effects of changing rainfall and snow conditions, and studying the effects of changing forests on particular species and ecosystem services. This information is helping to inform restoration efforts undertaken by the Forest Service and its partners to make our forests more resilient. And DOI and USDA are working together with other Federal agencies, states, tribes, and private landowners to engage in historic, landscape scale conservation projects that will put critical ecosystems on a stronger footing for the future.

Climate change poses a tough new challenge for the forest ecosystems that provide so much for all Americans. Following President Obama’s lead, we’re getting ahead of the game – focusing on new partnerships, strengthening interagency collaboration, and ensuring that the best science is available as we take on climate change in the years to come.

Robert Bonnie is Under Secretary of Agriculture for Natural Resources and the Environment

Anne Castle is Assistant Secretary for Water & Science at the Department of the Interior