Fire Can Be Both Harmful and Beneficial
Post by 2022 student Kira Maier
I have very little background when it comes to plants and fire, so this section with Dr. Hagan really taught me a lot. Coming in, I was a little nervous for this section because of my limited experience, but it turned out to be a lot easier to understand and accomplish than I thought. Once I learned a plant and knew what specific to look for from petal pattern to wave of the leaves, it was easy to just call them out as I glanced over the plots. For the plants that we did not know, we could use apps on our phones such as Seek and iNaturalist to help identify them and fill the holes in our knowledge. Sometimes it was useful and other times the app could not even identify them, so we ended up labeling them as unknown and taking pictures for future identification. Sometimes, I could recognize some plants that we also have in South Carolina. I still did not know the name of the plant, but I could recognize it and that allows me to see the breadth of its range.
While we were learning to identify the previously mentioned plants, Dr. Hagan encouraged us to think about what it meant when certain plants grew in certain places. For example, one of our plot areas was on the top of a hill where it was incredibly dry, flat, and rocky. There was very little vegetation covering the ground and a lot of dead burned trees were laying across and still standing. It was one of our un-thinned burned treatment areas. Most of the vegetation was legumes which are nitrogen fixing plants, and Mustards, which are non-mycorrhizal and only need phosphorus to survive. That meant that the soil in that plot was high in phosphorus and lacking in nitrogen. It was so cool to think of the data we were collecting and noticing what it meant right away in the field. Thanks to these plants the area will once again become rich in nitrogen and new fauna that will be unrecognizable to me in the future if I return.
I never really had any experience with fires except for little campfires that I make in the backyard. During the spring semester, when we went to Georgia to see the aftermath of an east coast wildfire was my first time seeing the aftermath of a fire. There was a lot of debris on the ground which was creating more fuel for another future fire. The fire also did not burn hot enough to burn the duff and get up in the crown of the trees in some areas. However, when we got out here, we could see a clear difference between the eastern and western fires. The western fire, first off consumed way more acres than the eastern fire. This fire also burned extremely hot and got up to the crown of the trees. It burned most, if not all the duff. In some places, after 2 years, the duff and litter still have not started to come back.
It has been very educational to see how this fire has affected the people who own the land which it burned through. It has been an emotional rollercoaster for the Segars family and Frost family. They were lucky that they were able to save their cattle and their homes, but many ranchers in the area were not so lucky. During the days of the fire, Goz flew out here and tried to help Terry clean up. You could tell that it was still an emotional subject for him. However difficult the time was for them when it first happened, their land is all the healthier since the fire. Hearing them talk about how overgrown the land was before the fire and seeing it now after the fire, it has opened a lot. In our plots we are seeing much more plant diversity than we expected when first coming out here. The meadows are full of grasses and wildflowers. Sunlight can actually reach the forest floor. Don’t get me wrong, there were quite a few areas that still looked decimated in the areas where the fire burned the hottest, but overall, the ecosystem of the plains bounced back strong. Even Terry said the fire helped his land look the best it’s looked in some time. So, the fire was a blessing in disguise.
I think the overall goal for these ranchers and Montanans in general is to not stop fires but control them. As we’ve seen, fire can both be harmful and beneficial. Hopefully, using fire control methods like prescribed burns and thinning, it’s possible to keep wildfires under control.
