But that all changed as we got good at fire suppression — too good it turns out. Fire-fighting strategies of the last 120 years have changed the landscape. By suppressing the fires, the forests grew extra thick, creating more fuel for high-severity fires.
Those high-severity fires burned so hot and so thoroughly that they’ve altered the nature of the forests, burning stands of trees and creating more of a forest of shrub fields and grasslands and lending itself to more fires.
“Because of these fires, forests are converting to shrub fields and grasslands, and the forests will not come back in our lifetimes,” Ellis Margolis, research ecologist for the U.S. Geological Survey, told the Albuquerque Journal recently.
That’s called “type conversion,” where a stand of trees burns so severely that a new kind of vegetation persists afterward. This is combined with climate change, which in effect causes more and drier fuels and a longer fire season.
To counter all of this, New Mexico is working on a $65 million reforestation center to expand the state’s capacity to replant trees and other vegetation. The effort is being led by a coalition of universities and state agencies with the hopes of producing 5 million tree seedlings a year. The state is capable now of producing just 300,000.
The coalition aims to plant a variety of trees that are capable of surviving climate change. But experts say the 5 million trees is a fraction of what’s going to be needed to counter this massive change, adding that some of the terrain burned in recent fires will be gone for generations — maybe forever.
