For nearly half a century, lightning-sparked blazes in Yosemite’s Illilouette Creek Basin have rippled across the landscape — closely monitored, but largely unchecked.
For nearly half a century, lightning-sparked blazes in Yosemite’s Illilouette Creek Basin have rippled across the landscape — closely monitored, but largely unchecked. Their flames might explode into plumes of heat that burn whole hillsides at once, or sit smoldering in the underbrush for months.
The result is approximately 60 square miles of forest that look remarkably different from other parts of the Sierra Nevada: Instead of dense, wall-to-wall tree cover — the outcome of more than a century of fire suppression — the landscape is broken up by patches of grassland, shrubland and wet meadows filled with wildflowers more abundant than in other parts of the forest. These gaps in the canopy are often punctuated by the blackened husks of burned trunks or the fresh green of young pines.
“It really is a glimpse into what the Sierra Nevada was like 200 years ago,” said Scott Stephens, a professor of environmental science, policy and management at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-director of Berkeley Forests.
Stephens is the senior author of a new study that gathers together decades of research documenting how the return of wildfire has shaped the ecology of Yosemite National Park’s Illilouette Creek Basin and Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ Sugarloaf Creek Basin since the parks adopted policies for the basins — at Illilouette Creek in 1972 and Sugarloaf Creek in 1968 — to allow lightning-ignited fires to burn.
Read more at University of California - Berkeley
Image: In Yosemite’s Illilouette Creek basin, a stand of young Sierra lodgepole pine grow in a forest clearing that was created by wildfire 20 years prior. Mt. Starr King appears in the background. (Credit: UC Berkeley photo by Scott Stephens)
