This summer felt like a scene straight out of an apocalyptic film — homes were lost, environments were engulfed by flames, smoke filled the air and ash rained down upon countless towns.
During the summer of 2015 the Inland Northwest alone had a record of 52 large fires burning at once. Penelope Morgan, a University of Idaho professor with the College of Natural Resources, said the increasing severity of the region’s fire season doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the world just yet.
“When people move to Seattle or Portland, they understand that they have to deal with the rain,” Morgan said. “Well, when it comes to Idaho, you’re going to get fires — fires and smoke are a part of the world, especially in the interior west.”
Jackson Flynn | Blot
Kyle Swanstrom is a fire ecology major at the University of Idaho and spends his summers fighting wildland fires for the Bureau of Land Management.
Although fires are as natural to the area as rain is to the Pacific Northwest, Morgan said fire ecologists and environmental researchers have noticed a startling trend. Since 1984, the fire season has gotten to be a month longer, Morgan said, which will lead to many large fires and will have two to five times as much area burned in the next few decades.
Morgan said this year to date, 7.5 million acres have burned across the United States. The 10-year running average of acres burned stands around five million, which means about 50 percent more area has burned this year compared to the last 10 years.
Crystal Kolden, a UI assistant professor with a doctorate degree in geography, said fires are a tool necessary for the growth and success of the region’s environment, but the sustained severity of fire seasons over the past few years could change the composition of the landscape.
“This has been a fairly severe fire season for the Northwest, but it’s in line with the drought conditions we’ve experienced all through last year,” Kolden said. “It’s not unusual to have these intense fire seasons in this region, but what is unusual is that 2015 was the fourth year in a row that the Northwest had a very large, active fire season.”
Kolden, whose research specializations include ecology and climate impacts, said among the many contributing factors to such severe fires are bark beetles, a reduction in logging, long-term drought, climate change and even decades worth of successful fire suppression.
The firefighter success rate of suppressing fires not only resulted in the accumulation of dry fuels over time, but Kolden said it also contributed to a shift in the composition of the landscape.
“There was an enormous amount of fires in the area before humans settled here, and as a result the native flora and fauna evolved with those conditions,” Kolden said. “Fire is rejuvenating for many of these ecosystems — it refreshes things and creates this mosaic of vegetation that supports a large biodiversity, but all of that gets diminished when you begin suppressing a lot of that fire.”
Kolden said the success of fire suppression paired with consecutive years of drought have made it more difficult for native species to return to the environment and easier for invasive species to settle in the area.
“In the past decades, there have been many places where after a fire has burned we’ve not seen the same species returning,” Kolden said. “Instead we’ve seen new species that favor warmer climates or invasive species take over.”
However, Kolden said since the long, intense fire seasons began, fire ecologists have started to see a gradual return to what the composition of the environment was like before humans settled.
Kyle Swanstrom, a UI student and fire ecology major, said to aid the natural process, fire crews try to prevent the introduction of invasive species into an environment immediately after a fire has burned.
“When a fire is wrapping up, we want to make sure we have the next step ready to go,” Swanstrom said. “We go through and plant the seeds of the region’s historically native species so there’s a good chance the area will reestablish a level of ecological stability.”
Swanstrom, who spent the summer working for the Bureau of Land Management in Twin Falls, Idaho, said as a student starting out in the field, he believes he is going to be seeing a number of changes in the years to come because of how much the climate has changed over the last 80 years. Swanstrom said he believes new policies and procedures are needed when it comes to how fires are fought as well as how to adapt to the changing landscapes.
Kolden said of all of the contributing factors to the succession of large, severe fire seasons, the drought that the Northwest has experienced remains one of the strongest.
“We’re still searching for concrete evidence, but as scientists and researchers, we can make an estimated guess that climate change plays a role in the droughts we’ve experienced,” Kolden said.
Kolden said the idea of climate change as a contributing factor to the change in both the severity of the fire season and the ways in which it impacts the environment is one that still requires a great deal of research.
“It’s an area we really don’t know,” Kolden said. “Climate change is happening so fast that it’s really difficult for us to try and keep up with how quickly some of these environments are changing.”
Despite the ongoing research process, Kolden said the past four years of large, intense fire seasons serve as indicators of what the future of the Inland Northwest is likely to hold under sustained drought conditions.
Morgan said while such severe fire seasons can cause the widespread destruction of environments and homes, it’s important to remember that there is more to fire than the labels of “good” or “bad.”
“It’s easy to listen to Smokey the Bear and think all fires are terrible, scary things, but fire is an act of nature that is more complex than ideas of what’s good and what’s bad,” Morgan said. “Fire can be traumatic for humans and animals, but it can also renew habitats and increase natural resources … Not all fires are bad, not all fires are good. They’re somewhere in between.”