Time management difficulties

Classes and a full time job have made it hard to keep this blog updated. I'll hopefully add more current postings soon!

Fires on the Front Range

Lots of coverage of the fires in Colorado in local media, with one really big fire above Golden, and a few down on the Arkansas Valley. Last night on my way to work, there was a lot of smoke from a small fire on the Air Force Academy. That one was put out in a few hours.

Conditions have been good for fires in the lower elevations in Colorado. The wind has been pretty strong along the Front Range and the temperatures warm. We haven't had much precipitation lately to boot. No surprise we're seeing a lot of fires.

I made a quick map to show some of the fire activity for this year. I added a layer to show drought conditions to see if they are making fire conditions worse.

The drought data is current to March 15 and the fire data is current to this morning. The fire data comes from satellites and remote sensing processing at RSAC. The satellite made a pass over Colorado just before 6 yesterday and around 10 this morning, the 22nd.

(click to enlarge)

The fire near Golden is the only one of these displayed that seems to be larger than 300 acres (still looking for the data on size). It is the only fire to show up on the Forest Service's large fire incident map,and it blew up last night to more than 1200 acres, according to the Denver Post.

As expected, most of the fires are in the driest areas of the region. What surprised me is that most of the fires are along the river corridors. My hunch is that these fires might be caused by farmers burning their fields. I thought it was more common to do this in the fall, but something is going on, especially along the Arkansas, but also along the South Platte, Gunnison and San Juan rivers.

I've been wondering about the seasonality of the fire regime where the shortgrass prairie meets Gambel oak and Ponderosa pine along the mountain front. Most of the research on fire regimes has been done, for obvious reasons, on higher elevation, forested areas. Big forest fires often happen in Colorado during the summer and early fall after the snow melts. Most of the fires this year to date, into the spring, have been small grassland fires. This seemed to be true last year as well.  Is the early spring always a busy time for grassland fires around the Southern Rockies?

GIS and ecology

I've had three classes so far in my semester of GIS at PPCC. It struck me, looking at my last post, that re-doing Ahlefeldt's dissertation with GIS is a needed update, and could be done after I've had a few more semesters. I need a little programming to write the algorithms (or maybe ArcGIS will do this already) and the statistics to look for correlations between geology, geomorphology, soils, and climate in the Palmer Divide. In 1992, ESRI software was very expensive (not cheap now, however), and I'm not sure if students at CSU then had access to it at all. Now, at PPCC GIS students get a one year license for ArcGIS desktop as part of their tuition. It seems like this type of analysis is really the only way of doing things now.

Landscape Ecology of the Palmer Divide

The other day I finished reading Judy von Ahlefeldt's Ph.D. thesis on the ecology of the Palmer Divide. Judy is now the owner and publisher of the Black Forest News. Written in 1992 while she was at Colorado State, it focuses on answering the question of why does the Black Forest (of Colorado) exist? Why do we have a ponderosa pine forest extending out onto the Great Plains at the base of the Rocky Mountains?

Black Forest is at a four-way crossroads of the plains and the mountains, as well as the northern and southern Great Plains. The Black Forest is a mix of species such as Douglas fir, white fir, ponderosa pine, pinon pine, junipers, gambel oak, and relict tallgrass prairie. In her thesis, she looks at the geology, geomorphology, climate, soils and vegetation of the area to build a landscape ecology of the Palmer Divide.

She also throws in some ordination graphs, and uses computer programs like DECORANA and CANOCO, which at this point are beyond me. However, I got some good information I could take away.

Soil parent material and particle size (and their water holding capabilities) follow vegetation communities pretty closely.

• Northern mixed grass prairie is linked with eolian (wind blown) sand dunes and sandy alluvium
• Shortgrass prairie likes warm, clayey, alkaline (high Ca++ and Mg++ levels) soils
• Coniferous forest seems to be found more on weathered Pikes Peak granite and arkosic (high feldspar content, eroded sandstone) residuum of the the Dawson formation, in areas of higher moisture
• Douglas fir is found on steep (>20%), north-facing slopes where snow lingers longer
• Pinyon-juniper shows up in south or southeast facing slopes in soils with high clay content
• Gambel oak which grows by itself in grassland experiences less frequent and less intense fires than oak that grow in ponderosa pine.
• Grazing has altered the fire regime of the region
• Tallgrass prairie appears on arkosic alluvium and clay-silt soils. Little bluestem and prairie dropseed are found in cooler areas as opposed to mountain mahogany shrubland, which appears in warmer areas with sandy clay.
• Areas a few miles apart have different moisture seasonality. The south side of the divide and the highest elevation have a late summer moisture pulse, or monsoon, while the area north all the way to Castle Rock gets an earlier spring pulse of moisture, and not much a late summer monsoon.
  

Of further interest to me is that she mentions how no one alive has seen what the Black Forest looked like before it was logged extensively, grazed, farmed, and then built over with more and more houses, which altered the fire regime to be virtually non-existent.

I wonder if it would be possible to recreate 1. a pre-1860 fire regime, and 2. a description of the structure and age class of the forest at that time. Are there records of the timber volume extracted from the forest in the 1860s? Could one go backwards and recreate a forest based on this information, if it exists?

What would it take to reactivate the eolian dunes? How does thinning change the ecology of the forest, now that the fires are completely suppressed?

Ozone up again on the Front Range

Looks like ozone levels are climbing back up again in the Front Range, and the window of attainment is closing. The increased pollution is probably due to several things - more oil and gas wells in Adams and Weld counties, scraping the barrel of what's left out there, and more drivers with their more driving. Hurry Fast Tracks!

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New report on forest health in Colorado

This post was the last one I was working on before I got really busy. It's a it dated, but here it is anyway.

You can download the report in a PDF (direct link) here.

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A new report gives the low down on the range of beetles devouring Colorado's conifers, as well as declining aspen.

Some 643,000 acres of lodgepole forest - about 42 percent of Colorado's total - were infested last year by mountain pine beetles, said Jen Chase, lead author of the 2006 Report on the Health of Colorado's Forests.

But the damage went beyond lodgepoles. Ponderosa pines also suffered from mountain pine beetles in 2006, along with:

• 138,000 acres of aspens declining from a mysterious affliction.

• 68,000 acres of spruce infested with bark beetles.

• 372,000 acres of subalpine fir attacked by Western balsam bark beetles, root diseases and other unknown factors.

• 19,000 acres of piñon pines infested with ips beetles.

• 93,000 acres of Douglas fir, true fir and spruce hit by Western spruce budworm.

As for the causes:

"A lot of these outbreaks got kicked off because of the drought, but forest conditions have allowed them to keep expanding," said U.S. Forest Service entomologist Bob Cain. "We have pretty uniform conditions of older, denser forests across the state, which are susceptible to the bark beetles," he said. "So even though the drought conditions have improved, the outbreaks are continuing."

Which sounds to me like he might be referring to those "decadent" old growth stands. I'm not convinced that any new logging regime is going to change this situation. From what I've seen, when the trees, living or dead, are logged, they come back in the same, dense, single age stands to which Bob Cain refers. And then we have a never ending cycle until the seed stock is gone.

Moreover, no reference to global warming in the article, which with warming temperatures has reduced the winter freezes that kept the beetles in check. Nothing to be done about that for a long time.

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2006 El Niño fakes out Colorado forecasters

Here's the summary from the article which details the unusual winter we've had in Colorado so far.

An El Niño weather system arrived in the Pacific Ocean last fall, warming a stretch of water west of Peru's coast.

The last seven El Niños brought winters that were warmer and drier than usual in Colorado, with a few heavier snowstorms in the fall and spring.

This time, January was the eighth-coldest on record in Denver, and the monthly snowfall was twice the normal tally - nearly 16 inches instead of about 8, said Matt Kelsch, a meteorologist with the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder.

There has been measurable snow on the ground in the Front Range for 50 consecutive days, the third- longest period on record, Kelsch said.

This season's El Niño was a typical one, "moderate sized, fairly vanilla, really," Wolter said. "But the impacts have been anything but normal in this hemisphere."

Feeding the almost weekly snows in December and January was an odd constellation of forces, he said, including a warmer- than-usual western Pacific Ocean and storms that moved in from the northwest, not the southwest, as they normally do.

And for those warming skeptics:

The recent cold and snow do not mean global warming has skipped Colorado, he said.

While the background climate is warming, temperatures and precipitation will always bounce around the norm, Hoerling said.

The Longmont Times-Call chimes in:

Mike Gillespie, a snow-survey supervisor for the NRCS, said the state has had an unusual trend of large snowstorms hitting the Front Range and Eastern Plains instead of the Western Slope.

“Normally, our storm track comes into the northwest, and this year it’s been coming around the backside,” he said.

Summit daily follow up on dust and early snow melt

The Summit daily has a detailed article about the effects of dust blowing in from Utah, and coating the snow in the Rockies. This causes the snow to melt faster, by as much as 18 days, which creates problems for water users in Colorado. The dust is from soil that is disturbed by cows and ORVs that crush bacteria, called cryptograms, that hold the soil in deserts together.