Thinning is not logging; burns critical to forest health

Fuel treatments and burns on the Santa Fe National Forest helped contain the Rio en Medio Fire in 2020 and the Cerro Pelado Fire last year. Now, those of us who live in Santa Fe County are seeing the aspen bowl above The City Different holding snow and the pine accelerating the sublimation of critical water supplies.

Rowan Braybrook is with the nonprofit Northwest Natural Resource Group. Her group is studying ways to increase and prolong snowpack. “In really dense forests where the canopy is almost continuous, the snow can’t get at the ground very readily,” she says. “And it melts on those darker tree leaves or pine needles.” So in part of a Washington forest, the team thinned trees that were growing very close together and created small clearings — called gap cuts — where more snow could accumulate. [Tree thinning in dense forests could bolster Western snowpack, researchers suggest]

Tribes, well-funded local and volunteer fire departments could conduct prescribed fires and burn road ditches to create buffers where contract fire specialists don’t exist.

Primeval forests, by contrast, were a patchwork of varying densities, often sparsely populated by leviathan trees lording over a healthy, diverse and fruitful understory. Wildfire ecologists almost universally support fuels reduction — especially in forests that used to flourish under frequent ground fires, such as the ponderosa pine forests of the Southwest. Thinning followed by frequent ground fire is generally beneficial; it promotes nutrient cycling and maintains an open forest structure that won’t get dense enough to invite a crown fire. [Does thinning work for wildfire prevention?]

After amendments and a substitute the New Mexico Senate has unanimously passed a bill that prohibits prescribed burns on days when the National Weather Service issues a red flag warning.