[APWG] Increase in fires in arid USA maybe result of six reasons

[Craig Dremann]

Dear Penny, Wayne and All,

Weeds and climate change may be only two of the issues causing the fires
in the Great Basin, and the huge fires experienced in the last 10 years,
and the Great Basin and desert Southwest fires will continue to be
fueled, by at least six separate reasons: 

1.) FEDERAL MANAGEMENT & LACK OF MONEY FROM CONGRESS. A large percentage
of the lands in the Great Basin where the fires are occurring, are
Federally managed, and Congress currently only gives BLM a few cents per
acre per year, to restore native ecosystems or conduct exotic weed
management. 

Perhaps someone on one of these lists can give us the FY 2008 per-acre
figures?

The costs to restore the Great Basin native ecosystems, to make them
more or less "fireproof" would probably be about $10 billion a year for
20 years.   

It's an issue of delayed costs of ecological restoration and management,
of not making any ecological restoration or weed management investments
over the last 100 years, and then the ecosystem is so broken down, that
all of a sudden, you have to spend a huge amount of money to save it
from going over the cliff. 

2.) GRAZING CAUSING EMPTY SPACES - Cattle and sheep grazing have created
huge empty spaces the Great Basin and Southwestern arid ecosystems, 
where the perennial grasses used to be, like what my 1997 Megatransect
measured at http://www.ecoseeds.com/megatransect.html or you can see
photos of at http://www.ecoseeds.com/desertgrass.html

3.) EMPTY SPACES GETTING EXOTIC-FILLED - Those cattle and sheep created
empty spaces in the ecosystems getting filled by annual fire-fuel
exotics, like cheatgrass in the Great Basin or Saharan mustard in the
Southwest.  See some spectacular pictures showing how nicely the Saharan
mustard burns at http://www.ecoseeds.com/mustards.globeARIZ.html

4.) EMPTY SPACES & DESERTIFICATION - More cattle and sheep-created empty
spaces and bare soil in arid areas, and less vegetation causing
desertification of the soils, and ultimately less rainfall.  

There's a MIT professor, Prof. Elfatih Eltahir, doing a very interesting
study of the relationship between arid-lands vegetation and annual
rainfall, at http://web.mit.edu/eltahir/www/dhofar/content/fdi.htm

5.) PERPETUAL DROUGHT - Changes in the weather patterns, like perpetual
droughts, that you can see on the national weekly drought map at 
http://www.drought.unl.edu/dm/monitor.html  -- perpetual droughts
combined with continued sheep and cattle grazing, causes more bare
areas, creating perfect spots for those exotic annual weeds to colonize.

6.) LONG-TERM ARID LAND GRAZING MAKING THE SOILS TOO POOR, where only
the exotic annuals can survive?  Long-term arid-lands grazing can drop
soil nutient levels below what the native local plants need, to survive
as seedlings. Arid lands have naturally-low nutrient levels to begin
with, but what about the phosphorus that is removed by the sheep and
cattle grazing, and is taken out of the ecosystem in their bones?   

When I measure soil phosphorus all over the arid West, the mineral has
been mined out of the soil by 100-150 years of grazing, with the sheep
and cattle having walked away with it, leaving the soils too poor to
sustain a native ecosystem---producing lands where only the exotic
annual weeds like cheatgrass and Saharan mustard can now survive.

For example, the BLM-managed Mojave desert of California, for the whole
rainfall year of 2006-2007, got less than 1/2 inch of
precipitation---but BLM is still signing long-term sheep and cattle
grazing leases, despite the extreme drought, low vegetation production
even in normal rainfall years, low soil nutrient levels and the
objections of ecologists. 

Unless we start making a serious investment in restoring our Federally
managed lands, and make progress with these issues, like soil nutrient
levels, and start filling in the bare-empty spaces with local native
plants, we may produce another "Empty Quarter" like what they have on
the Arabian peninsula. See pics at
http://www.confluence.org/confluence.php?lat=19&lon=43

You can read a protest of three of the 2007 California BLM leases from
an ecological and phosphorus-perspective, at
http://www.ecoseeds.com/blmprotest.html

Sincerely,  Craig Dremann, Redwood City, CA (650) 325-7333