The eucalyptus grove on the Berkeley campus. Photo: John-Morgan.

Twenty years ago this week, a fire ripped through the Oakland and Berkeley hills, taking 25 lives and burning more than 3,000 homes. Eucalyptus trees, leaf litter, and long peels of bark were fuel for the fire. The Park Service estimates that eucalyptus was responsible for 70% of the energy released though combustion of vegetation. The trees, leaves, and bark are packed with phenolic compounds that burn hot, and the trees’ tall stature, proximity to homes, and long, swaying branches helped propagate the fire. To minimize future fires, the Park Service and others call for the removal of eucalyptus leaf litter and even whole trees—which is expensive and sometimes controversial.

Eucalyptus trees are relatively new to California. Originally from Australia, the species most common in the Bay Area, Eucalyptus globulus, or blue gum, was planted in the 1850s following the gold rush, with the hope that the timber could be used for railroad ties. Old-growth eucalyptus forests in Australia provided excellent timber. But while eucalyptus grew quickly in California, the young trees made awful timber. The wood twisted and split as it dried. So eucalyptus trees were instead used as windbreaks, to mark property boundaries, and to prevent erosion.

The trees quickly spread. Eucalyptus grow like crazy in the California climate, growing much taller than they do in their native Australia. Once eucalyptus become established, they can take over. Their Australian competitors did not come to California with them. Their dense canopy blocks light from entering the understory. As the fallen leaves decompose, they make the soil more acidic, and other plants can’t grow there. In California, eucalyptus often form a monoculture, devoid of other species. And the trees take up huge amounts of water. In some areas of the world, people planted eucalyptus to drain swamps and reduce the habitat for mosquito larvae, thereby eradicating malaria.

The blue gum eucalyptus evolved in a fire-prone environment, and the species has many fire adaptations. Their seeds are extremely resistant to heat. After a fire, trees that are relatively intact will quickly drop their seeds. And trees that have burned can re-sprout from their stumps and root systems.

To prevent eucalyptus from fueling future fires, the bark peelings and leaves need to be removed from the understory. A study conducted in the 1970s estimated 10-40% of the leaves that fall each year decompose in that year; fuel builds up quickly. Sometimes, entire trees need to be removed. After the 1991 fire, approximately 400 acres of eucalyptus were removed from the East Bay Regional Park District. Removing trees is even more difficult and expensive than removing litter, as the trees are huge and they re-sprout from the stump. To prevent re-sprouting, stumps need to be treated with chemical herbicides or covered in sheets of black plastic, so sunlight does not reach them. Another option is to topple the trees—knock them over so their roots are torn up from the ground. In addition to being a lot of work, removing trees is often controversial; neighbors don’t like it. Several large eucalyptus trees were recently removed from a Department of Motor Vehicles property in Oakland, resulting in neighborhood outrage.

Removing eucalyptus trees is labor intensive and expensive. But then, so are fires.

Wildfire ripped through this area of forest, which was infested with Sudden Oak Death. Does infestation with SOD make wildfires burn with more intensity? Photo: Kerri Frangioso.

From Oregon to Big Sur, potentially millions of trees have been killed by Sudden Oak Death, or SOD. In 2006 and 2007, researchers from UC Davis set up a large-scale study in the coastal forests near Big Sur to examine the spread of the disease and its impact on forest dynamics. The area was one of the first to be affected by SOD. Members of the Rizzo Lab at UC Davis had established 280 plots across the region, carefully counting and measuring each tree and checking for SOD infection. Then, in June 2008, the Basin Complex Fire ripped through Big Sur, burning over 95,000 hectares of forest. By the time the fire was contained, over a month after it began, one third of the team’s plots were crisp and blackened.

While the fire burned, news media and firefighters assumed that areas of the forest infested with SOD would burn more intensely—all the dead oak trees would fuel the fire. But the natural experiment created by the overlap of the Basin Complex Fire and the UC Davis study allowed researchers to test whether SOD did in fact make wildfire worse. Their study will soon be published in the journal Ecological Applications; a preprint of their paper is available here. What they found was not what the news media or the firefighters predicted.

Andrew Molera State Park, the same plot as the top photo, before the Basin Complex Fire. Photo: Kerri Frangioso.

Invasion of the water molds
Sudden Oak Death came to California in the 1990s, probably on the leaves of a rhododendron shipped in for the nursery industry. The disease is caused by a water mold, called Phytophthora ramorum. It can spread short distances in splashes of water, and can potentially travel longer distances when water is blown about in storms.

Not all trees that are infected with the pathogen will die. Some species, like California Bay Laurel, do just fine. But California Bay is like Typhoid Mary—it serves as a host to the pathogen and allows it to spread to other, more susceptible species. The pathogen is fatal to tanoak and several species of oak trees. These species develop cankers on their trunks, which bleed out a thick, red liquid. Slowly, the bark around the entire circumference of the tree is affected; all tissue above this girdle dies, leading to the death of the tree.

A natural experiment
In 2008, Margaret Metz had just begun a new post-doc in Dave Rizzo’s lab. She was to work on the Big Sur project and analyze the data from the 280 plots to understand SOD impacts in the region. Her colleagues had spent months setting up the plots for their SOD study. They knew the size and location of every tree, whether it was standing upright and healthy (or newly infested with SOD), or whether it was dead and decomposing on the ground. When Metz found out her study site was burning, she was devastated. All that hard work—and all those trees—was going up in flames.

However, the dismay was short-lived. The team had a perfect pre-fire dataset. They just needed to census the plots after the fire, to get a rare comparison of the severity of fire in areas with and without SOD. This was an experiment they didn’t intend on doing—but drought and a dry lightning strike had made it possible. Dave Rizzo was able to quickly procure funding for the researchers to re-census the plots. “You could never do a controlled burn on that scale,” says Metz.

Where there’s SOD, there’s more intense fire?
News articles about the Basin Complex fire linked SOD to fire intensity, and firefighters reported that fires were burning more fiercely in areas with evidence of SOD. So when Metz and her colleagues analyzed their data, they thought they’d see that fires were more severe in plots infested with SOD. But that is not what they found. Their data showed that plots with and without SOD showed no difference in fire severity. They quantified fire severity using something called the Composite Burn Index. It takes into account the effects of fire on the ground, as well as in the shrubs and trees. Composite Burn Index did not differ between plots infested with SOD and plots without SOD. The popular assumption, that SOD makes wildfires burn more intensely, was wrong.

Dead tanoak along the Big Sur Highway. Photo: Karl Buermeyer, COMTF.

However, Metz and the team could dig deeper into their data. From their pre-fire data, they knew whether SOD had infested the plots recently, or whether SOD had been there for some time. It can take several years for a tree to die from SOD. When trees are first infected with SOD and die, their leaves turn dry and brown, and they remain on the tree for a year or more. Later, the branches fall to the ground, and eventually the whole trunk falls over. The fuel created by newly infected trees and trees that have been infected for several years is quite different. Metz and her colleagues found that in plots that were newly infested, plots with more dead biomass (or fuel) burned more intensely. In plots that were infested some time ago, the amount of biomass was not related to the intensity of the fire. They suspect that crisp brown leaves on newly infected trees allow the fire to burn high in the canopy. In plots infested long ago, the dead trees are on the ground; in this case, the fire damages the soil and the tree roots, which makes slopes vulnerable to erosion from mudslides. The conventional wisdom about SOD and fire was not quite right, but there was some truth to it—it just depends on when the forest was infested with SOD. Newly infested forests burn with more intensity than un-infested forests or forests that were infested some time ago.

Future forests
It has been almost three years since the Basin Complex Fire burned up Metz’s plots. Now, she and her colleagues are looking to see how the forest recovers—from the fire, and from SOD. Maia Beh, a grad student in the Rizzo Lab, found that of the plots that had SOD in the pre-fire surveys, only 20% still have it today. They’re not sure whether it’s because of the fire, or because there have been two years of drought. The pathogen, P. ramorum, is dependent on water, and doesn’t do well in drought conditions. They’re looking at plots that did not burn up in the fire to see whether the decline in the pathogen is due to drought, fire, or some combination of the two.

Though the incidence of the pathogen has declined on land, it is still present in almost all the watersheds in the area. And, last year we had late rains, extending through spring into the early summer. Late rains with warm temperatures create conditions that are ideal for the pathogen, says Metz.

With continued careful sampling of those 280 plots—and maybe a few more unintended natural experiments—Metz and her colleagues will learn how forests recover from both fire and SOD.

Learn more about SOD
To prevent the spread of the pathogen P. ramorum, take steps make sure it isn’t hitchhiking on your boots. Clean your boots into the buckets of diluted bleach that you might find at trailheads, or spray your boots down with Lysol.

Take part in a SOD-blitz, a citizen science project. Learn more about SOD and help figure out where the pathogen has spread, with UC Berkeley plant pathologist Matteo Garbolotto. You can see Garbolotto on the QUEST video Plant Plague: Sudden Oak Death.

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Photo taken by Edgar Lee

There have been times I’ve seen the Crucible from the road, as I made my way to visit my dad. Last year, Creative Director, Michael Sturtz gave me and a few colleagues a tour through the space. Walking through in awe, I kept thinking about my dad and how he would be a kid in a candy store at the Crucible. My dad got his degree in mechanical engineering and I grew up with the mantra, "If something works, take it apart and find out why”.

Crucible takes that one step further in adding artistic and community components. The Crucible is a non-profit arts education center that fosters a collaboration of arts, industry and community by teaching and showcasing fire, metal, glass and light art. Founded in 1999, The Crucible offers more than 500 classes to nearly 5,000 students annually in disciplines such as bronze casting, neon art, welding, glass working, blacksmithing, fire dancing, textiles and woodworking. One of my favorite parts of the Crucible is the converted fire truck coined the Educational Response Vehicle that acts as a mobile classroom. It was brought out to the California Academy of Sciences for our NightLife World Ocean day celebration last June. Off the truck came blacksmithing, glass blowing and torch welding units. The fire cannon also welcomed guests at it belched out billows of fire into the night sky.

I was also very impressed with the strong community tie of the Crucible. They have a few tiers of a bike program for local west Oakland youth. Workshops are set up for kids to bring in their bikes to be fixed. Technicians explain what they are doing so the kids can get a better understanding of “how it works”. For those interested, there is a six-week Earn-A-Bike program where youth can learn more. They fix two bikes, one to keep and one to sell to raise funds for the program. Youth who want more after the six-week course can also enroll to create their own custom bike in by bringing in their own bike to re-create using more intermediate skills. The bike program has been the most popular community outreach program and continues to grow.

Last Friday, January 14 and Saturday, January 15, 2011 from 7PM-11PM, the Crucible had their 12th Anniversary Benefit show entitled, "The Crucible Revival; Keep the Fire Burning." Proceeds went to support educational programs at the Crucible and the line up included a fabulous mix of performances, dance, fire and art. Performances focused on reviving beloved and specataular moments of Crucible history in tribute to Michael Strutz’s contributions in his tenure as founder and both Executive and Creative Director. More information on the line up and tickets can be found here. This Thursday, the Crucible comes out to NightLife to add the heat to the theme Fire and Ice.

Being in the Crucible space reminds me of sitting in the garage when I was young watching my dad work on something. The space is set up so people can take “how it works” and transforms it into knowledge, community, art and performance. It’s an inspiring place.

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He went on to inform the crews where the ambulance would pick up casualties in the event of an accident, and that helicopter extraction was standing by in case anyone was badly burned. The crew of about 30 firefighters appeared completely unfazed, just another day at the office. The divide between these fairly heroic-looking fire crew members and myself was exaggerated by the fact that I was provided with the last available set of fireproof clothing, which was far too large for me. I also had to figure out how to wear my bulky headphones and a bright orange hard hat simultaneously.

It was my first day out as a primary shooter for QUEST’s Science on the SPOT. As the summer intern I was just happy to be out in the field producing content, instead of being back in an office logging tapes and making coffee the way so many productions require of their interns. I had just moved back to the bay area from Bozeman, where I had spent the last three years as a graduate student in Montana State University’s MFA program in Science and Natural History Filmmaking. A few months earlier I had met QUEST Producer Chris Bauer at the San Francisco Ocean Film Festival. We both had films screening the festival, and between screenings I had told him that I was a huge fan of KQED and QUEST. He suggested that as a student I should look into the possibility of interning with QUEST. Now here we were, three months later, about to film a prescribed burn intended to improve habitat quality for endangered Mission Blue Butterflies by increasing the population of their fire disturbance dependent host plant, the Silver Leaf Lupine.

I was very eager to try to impress Chris by getting some great footage of the burn, despite being relatively unfamiliar with the QUEST camera and audio equipment. Compounding my challenge was the bright sun and wind; not ideal conditions for shooting interviews with digital video.

The burn had actually been planned for the week before, but thick fog dampened the possibility of a quality burn at that time. But now the weather was just right for a fire, and the fog seemed content to lurk off shore in the distance. When I was first told about the shoot I had pictured a giant controlled burn the size of several football fields with 30 foot flames leaping into the sky, but I later found out that the burns would actually be performed in 3 meter square open topped stainless steel boxes. The fire crews placed the boxes over areas of grass and brush that had been previously marked of and used gasoline in a drip can to ignite the dry vegetation which immediately lit up. In my eagerness, I moseyed up to the edge of the box and peered over the edge with the camera. While it was not the huge conflagration I had previously imagined it was certainly a powerful blaze, enough to singe the fuzzy wind protection covering the camera’s microphone (don’t tell anyone), and make me consider taking a few steps back. When the fuel was exhausted and the fire burned out, they would move the box to the next plot and “cold trail” the burnt plot with fire hoses.

While humans have an innate fear of fire, it is a natural part of the coastal grassland ecosystem. Wildlife Ecologist Bill Merkle explained to us that historically the coastal region was comprised of a mosaic of habitats allowing any one particular area to burn at a time within its own boundary. Humans had a drastic effect on the ecosystem, and generations raised on warnings from a certain bear in a ranger’s hat had resulted many areas going unnaturally long without a burn.

This brings us to the point of this entire endeavor… by performing prescribed burns on specific parts of the coastal grassland within the Golden Gate National Recreation Area Bill Merkle and his partners hoped to increase the Silver Leaf Lupine population, with the plan to burn larger areas if the experimental burns proved successful. Lupine thrives in areas that experience disturbance, and the plant’s seeds actually require some sort of "scarification" by fire or abrasion in order to germinate. The day’s experiment was to compare scraping with McLeod fire rake to a controlled burn, to see would prove more successful in inducing seed germination and growth.

By the end of the day the crew had successfully burned four separate areas and seemed satisfied with their work. I was also feeling pretty good about the footage I had collected, and the interview we had done with Bill Merkle. It was then that I happened to look over at my fellow QUESTrian Chris and realized that we had both forgotten sunscreen. And with that, two rather rosy-hued filmmakers headed back to the city.

Watch the video below or visit the Science on the SPOT: Fire and Butterflies page.

QUEST on KQED Public Media.

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Quest Educational Resources

 Print Guide - Angel Island

 Angel Island KML File

 Tips to get the kids in your life out into nature

 Designing an Exploration on Google Maps

Additional Links

• Angel Island State Park
• Bio: Breck Parkman, Senior State Archaeologist
• Angel Island Archaeology – Post-Fire Survey Photo Gallery

"2008 was one of the hottest years on record."

Just last week, Max Moritz and his team at UC Berkeley's Center for Fire Research & Outreach published a study that shows widely varied fire response to climate changes around the world. Post-doctoral fellow Meg Krawchuk was the lead data cruncher in the effort, with contributions from researchers at Texas Tech University.

What they found were suggestions of rapid changes in fire regimes, and not all in the same direction. Some places (like most of California) will likely see a spike in the fire hazard, while other regions (like the Pacific Northwest) could see a retreat of wildfire frequency and intensity:

"In contrast to any expectation that global warming should necessarily result in more fire, we find that regional increases in fire probabilities may be counter-balanced by decreases at other locations, due to the interplay of temperature and precipitation variables. Despite this net balance, our models predict substantial invasion and retreat of fire across large portions of the globe."

Moritz has been stumping for new approaches to fire-climate analysis. He says rather than treat fire strictly as the product of other climate change variables, we should think of it also as a climate driver.

Map shows areas of potential fire advance (orange) and retreat (blue) by 2010-2039 (medium-high emissions scenario)

You can use the player below to hear an excerpt from my interview with Moritz, in which he explains the new perspective that he thinks his team's study brings to the fire-climate connection.

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This surprised me. By now, I am used to the usual suspects of species degradation: urban sprawl, loss of habitat, pollution, shrinking resources. Those are almost always given as the explanation for why a particular species is threatened or endangered.

Not so with the California condor. Those factors certainly put pressure on the condor to survive in California, but surprisingly, there is one factor that trumps all of those, according to wildlife biologists.

Lead bullets.

Not because condors are shot by guns with lead bullets – no, lead bullets are dangerous to condors because they eat them.

Condors are like vultures; they feed on carrion. Dead animals. And many animals in the wild die when they're shot by hunters. So when an animal is shot, and then gets away from the hunter before it dies, or when a hunter guts an animal in the field and leaves the remains behind, that meat has lead fragments in it. So it's easy for California condors to ingest lead, and that can be fatal.

Lead has been shown to be hazardous to humans in even small amounts. Condors weigh about 20 pounds, so it doesn't take much lead to harm them.

The state legislature passed a law in July that bans lead bullets from areas with condors, from the San Francisco Bay Area south to San Diego.

Hunters are reluctant to simply throw away all of their lead ammunition, though, to purchase copper bullets at a higher price. And many of them are unaware of the law – or unaware that the ammo they're using is lead. Many lead bullets are topped with copper, so they look like copper bullets. This not only makes it hard for hunters to identify which of their bullets are lead-based, but it makes it difficult for state parks rangers to identify them, as well.

Listen to the Condor Return radio report online.

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You may listen to the "California's Fire Future" Radio report online, as well as find additional links and resources.

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