A Long-lost Friend on the Landscape

Here's a rather apocalyptic shot:

This is looking over the hill prairie at Gander Mountain Forest Preserve, on April 19. Most of the hill looked black like this, below the tree cover. (The lack of leaves is due to a combination of the date, the cold spring we've had, and the species of trees; oaks leaf out late.)

Down the hill a ways, on another trip a week or so later, I found this white gem bravely growing in the desolation:

Bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis), Gander Mt. FP, Lake Co, IL  5/3/2014

This is Bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis), one of our early-flowering woodland wildflowers. At the moment, it's not having to compete with any other plants for sunlight, water, or minerals. For Bloodroot, if your seeds can survive, a fire is just fine.

The oaks that dominate this forest grew from saplings that don't handle shade very well. This means that in an undisturbed forest, most of the young trees waiting for their elders to fall over will be maples. Over hundreds of years, the maples will slowly replace the oaks. Here in Lake County, you can see a maple forest in the flats at Ryerson Forest Preserve. Elsewhere, fires have historically kept the young maples from surviving long enough to take over.

Turns out this fire wasn't the result of a lightning strike, a leftover campfire, or some overachieving arsonist. This one was set intentionally by the Forest Preserve District on April 18. If this sounds odd, that's not surprising: generations of Americans have grown up with Smoky the Bear's admonition that "Only YOU can prevent forest fires!" But our large-scale prevention programs have altered many habitats almost beyond recognition, an issue we've only really started dealing with over the last 30 years or so.

Today, researchers are recognizing the importance of fires to habitats that have evolved with both natural and anthropogenic fires for tens of thousands of years. (1, 2, 3) Tallgrass prairie, oak forest, many pine forests, all burned on a regular basis for centuries.

There is one thing about fire management in a place like Lake County that many land managers don't have to deal with too much. All of our forest preserves and state parks are small parcels surrounded by private land. Many of them are bordered by homes and businesses. Whatever the benefits of wildfires, they don't apply to house fires! Forest and grass fires also produce copious amounts of smoke, which generates lots of complaints if the wind blows it into residential areas. So weather forecasts become a critical part of a fire manager's arsenal.

That bloodroot was actually a harbinger of things to come. Here's that same hill prairie, on June 3:

Aldo Leopold mentions how Dane County, Wisconsin lost it's prairies when settlers "just plowed enough fields to deprive the prairie of its immemorial ally: fire." That was 70 years ago, and we have finally enlisted that same ally in our own fight to preserve our landscape. (4)

(1) Angelstam, P. K. (1998). Maintaining and restoring biodiversity in European boreal forests by developing natural disturbance regimes. Journal of Vegetation Science, 9(4), 593-602.

 

(2) Wang, G. G., Lear, D. H. V., & Bauerle, W. L. (2005). Effects of prescribed fires on first-year establishment of white oak (< i> Quercus alba</i> L.) seedlings in the Upper Piedmont of South Carolina, USA. Forest ecology and management, 213(1), 328-337.

 

(3) Brose, P. H., & Van Lear, D. H. (1998). Responses of hardwood advance regeneration to seasonal prescribed fires in oak-dominated shelterwood stands. Canadian Journal of Forest Research, 28(3), 331-339.

 

(4) Leopold, A. (1949). A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There. New York: Oxford University Press.