Southern Exposure
For Georgia forestry and fire officials, 2007 will go down as one of the busiest fire seasons in history.
A complex number of fires in and around the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, eventually named the Georgia Bay Complex, consumed more than 500,000 acres of pine uplands, industrial pine plantations, and forested wetlands or “cypress domes” across southern Georgia and northern Florida.
While state and federal officials are busy preparing for another active fire season, they have implemented several programs to help recover from last year's round of fires, and also to better prepare Georgia's forests for the challenges it will face with a continuing drought.
Steve McNulty, a research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service, says that Forest Service models of both short-term and long-term projections show increased fire risk across the southern United States. He says that the region's drought is the result of a pronounced La Niña system (lower sea-surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean) that has reduced rainfall in the South for the last several years.
“In La Niña, the tendency is for globally cooler temperatures,” he says. “But we are coming out on the upward trend of the mean — even the lows are highs. La Niña cooling is being compensated by a general trend of global warming.”
Meteorological models predict that the La Niña system will dissipate later this year, but not before the South and the East Coast experience a dry spring and summer. “There has been some rain so far this spring, but we are expecting it to be dry as we move into the warmer months,” says McNulty.
The longer-term projections are even more troubling. McNulty says that beginning in 2009 and through 2010, an El Niño pattern (higher sea-surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean) is predicted to dominate climate systems. For the South, this translates into higher temperatures, which could even be enhanced with climate change. Even though El Niño normally means more precipitation for the South, the higher temperatures will mean faster evaporation. With increased precipitation driving “green-up” in the spring and higher temperatures drying fuels quicker. “Wildfires will be on the increase,” says McNulty.
Georgia officials are working to get increased fire protection in place to deal with the problem. Alan Dozier, the Georgia State fire chief, says that they are restricting burn authorizations in areas experiencing the worst impacts from the drought, particularly the northwest corner of the state.
The state also is working with timber companies and non-industrial private landowners to build and maintain firebreaks, reduce fuels, and create wider tree spacing in pine plantations to allow firefighting equipment to enter the stands (dense plantation stands created enormous access challenges during the Georgia Bay Complex fires of 2007). The state also has been encouraging landowners to harvest pine straw and, in some cases, treat fuels with herbicide.
Prescribed burns have been strategically implemented around the Okefenokee Swamp on 3,100 acres, and a 15- to 20-foot clearing has been established as a firebreak around the swamp. All of these projects have been done in cooperation with private landowners.
The Greater Okefenokee Association of Landowners, a collection of industrial and non-industrial private forest owners, Georgia and Florida forestry officials, and representatives from federal land-management agencies, has been deeply involved in the preparation efforts. GOAL has met three times per year to coordinate mitigation and preparation efforts, as well as establishing communication and coordination plans for potential suppression efforts. Dozier says that the cooperative plans set in place by GOAL “saved our bacon last year.”
Another encouraging effort in the recovery from the Georgia Bay Complex fires has been a Natural Resources Conservation Service cost-share program to assist landowners with replanting. For many private landowners who watched their entire timber investments literally go up in smoke, an alternative forest management approach is gaining traction. Frank Sorrells, a district manager in southeastern Georgia for the Georgia Forestry Commission, says that the cost-share program has been encouraging landowners to replant with longleaf pine.
“Longleaf is slower growing, but it does well in these soils. It is also more resistant to fire and drought,” he says. Slash and loblolly pine provide a quicker return on the investment, but with recent depressions in chip and pulp markets, and the devastating impacts of the fire, many landowners are looking to longleaf pine as a more long-term, less risky investment in forestry. “People here invest their money in the land like other people invest in the stockmarket,” says Sorrells.
Sheila Walker was one of the landowners who decided to participate in the NRCS program. Along with her brother, she manages 300 acres of forestland as part of a larger holding that has been in the family for generations. During the 2007 fires, the family watched as a stand of 25-year-old slash pine ready for harvesting was completely burned. The stand that would have brought the family close to $800,000 and funded her children's college education, as well as her retirement, was sold to salvagers for $66,000 in the salvage.
“Those weren't just trees — it was a heritage of forethought that had been passed on from one generation to the next,” she says. “My father had taken care of the land, prepared it and passed it on to us. The fire was a disaster beyond our control, so our generation has been bypassed and won't get a return. But we know we have to get it back in production for the next generation.”
Under the NRCS program, Walker is replanting 50% of her land with longleaf. She hopes to get some returns from pinestraw harvesting, a growing forest product market associated with longleaf, and she could get to harvest the trees in about 40 years.
So far, about 4,000 acres have been replanted in longleaf pine across southern Georgia under the NRCS program. Lynn Nichols, district conservationist with NRCS, says that increasing the amount of longleaf pine in the region provides opportunities for reintroducing prescribed fire to reduce fuels, a practice that has declined dramatically with the dominance of slash and loblolly pine plantation forestry.
Some unexpected rainfall this spring has eased the immediate crisis for Georgia fire and forestry officials.
Sorrells says that the Okefenokee Swamp and other low lying areas in southern Georgia are actually full of water this year compared with last year when many were dry. When fires entered those areas, there were abundant fuels to carry the fire and a layer of peat that allowed the fire to smolder for months. They aren't expecting any fires in the swamp this year.
But state forestry officials are not letting their guard down. Fire officials are watching the weather closely and putting an impressive set of programs in place to prepare for the next time “a fire comes out of the swamp.”
Josh McDaniel is the editor of the Advances in Fire Practice, a subsite of the Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center Web site focused on bringing efforts and ideas to the forefront that leaders in the fire management, practice and research communities have identified as innovative and widely applicable. It provides access to critical and proven fire information and resources. The new Advances in Fire Practice section can be reached directly by going to www.wildfirelessons.net/afp.
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