![]() ![]() This trip sparked a conversation between researchers and managers to discuss the historic context of pile burning and its relevance to current roadside and landscape fuels treatment. Out of concern for the broader implications of the persistence of past pile-burn scars combined with the backlog of piles to be burned, Rhoades, Fornwalt, and Schnackenberg organized the “Miles of Piles” Tour with staff from Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest and the Forest Service Rocky Mountain (Region 2) Regional Office in the fall of 2011. Pile burning can create grass and forb-filled openings that often remain treeless for decades, as can be seen in this aerial photo of a 40-year-old regenerating lodgepole pine stand in Grand County, Colorado. ![]() And in the long term, burning appears to create grass and forb-filled openings that can-and often do-remain treeless for decades. In the short term, this results in a release of nutrients that may pose water quality concerns in nearby streams. But when a pile is burned, the soil is heated for a long time-much longer than a typical wildfire-and often to a deeper depth and higher temperature. Pile burning is a relatively inexpensive option for reducing fire risk posed by the post-harvest slash (compared to alternatives such mastication), and less controversial than broadcast burning in densely-populated wildland interface zones. Thousands of additional piles are also found in National Parks and other areas of forestland in northern Colorado this slash comes from both the beetle epidemic and forest restoration and thinning treatments that are a consistent feature of forest management. In the National Forests of northern Colorado alone, there are over 140,000 piles of woody debris, or “slash”, quietly waiting to be burned-much of it coming from the salvage logging and hazard reduction treatments conducted in response to the widespread lodgepole pine mortality from the mountain pine beetle. ![]() The burning of slash piles is a traditional forestry practice and it remains the most common wood-waste disposal method used in forest management today. Persistent effects of pile burning, it seemed, were everywhere. Simultaneously, Rhoades’ colleague Paula Fornwalt, a research ecologist at RMRS, was noticing how often she was coming across weed-filled pile burn scars in ponderosa pine forests during the course of her research, some of which appeared to be years or even decades old. When looking down from the window of a plane during a bark beetle-damage flyover, he had noticed a honeycomb-like pattern of holes in the forest cover near the Fraser Experimental Forest in Grand County, Colorado these holes appeared to be legacies of past pile burns. Rhoades, a research biogeochemist at Rocky Mountain Research Station (RMRS), had himself become interested in the effects of pile burning a few years earlier. “I was amazed and concerned that you could still see these,” recalls Schnackenberg, a hydrologist with the Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest, “because at that time of that field trip we were dealing with a lot of beetle-killed lodgepole pine and creating condominium-sized burn piles of woody slash that were bigger than I’d ever seen.” She began to wonder whether the current burn piles would also leave substantial scars that would persist 50 years into the future. In the summer of 2007, US Forest Service colleagues Chuck Rhoades and Liz Schnackenberg were on a field trip in northern Colorado when Chuck pointed out gaps visible in a lodgepole pine forest about a half-mile away-scars created by slash pile burning after a timber sale cut 40 to 50 years prior. ![]()
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