In our Pyrocene age, enormous wildfires aren’t merely damaging ecosystems but transforming them.
Excerpt from this story from the New York Times:
Fire is a natural phenomenon; some species actually benefit from its effects and even those that don’t can be remarkably resilient in the face of flames. But as fires intensify, they are beginning to outstrip nature’s ability to bounce back. “Not all fires have the same impact,” said Morgan Tingley, an ecologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “These megafires are not good for ecosystems.”
Megafires, which dwarf typical wildfires in size, have an immediate ecological toll, killing individual plants and animals that might have survived more contained blazes. In the longer term, changing fire patterns could drive some species out of existence, transform landscapes and utterly remake ecosystems.
This incendiary age, which some scientists have called the Pyrocene, could lead to “a wholesale conversion of what habitats are where on the planet,” Dr. Hodges said. “Right now, everybody is talking about fires and smoke and who dies, because of the immediacy of this fire year. But really, truly, the long-term consequences are much more severe and sustained.”
Fire has been a planetary phenomenon for hundreds of millions of years, and plants and animals that evolved in fire-prone regions have adapted to periodic conflagrations. Some trees have roots that can re-sprout even if the trunk burns, while the mere smell of smoke will rouse some animals from torpor, a form of light hibernation.
But in many regions and ecosystems, fires are becoming larger and more severe. In the United States, wildfires burn far more land today than they did three decades ago, especially in Western states. Globally, the risk of catastrophic fires could increase by more than 50 percent by the end of the century, the United Nations reported.
Climate change is partly to blame, scientists said, but so are other factors, such as the expansion of highly flammable invasive grasses, which helped the deadly fires in Maui spread so quickly. More than a century of fire suppression has also left some forests thick with trees, giving flames more fuel. “When fires burn, they burn with so much intensity,” said Chris French, a deputy chief of the National Forest System in the United States.