The counterintuitive thing about protecting a forest from fire is that the protection is fire. A study of 26,400 giant sequoias across 19 groves in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks has now put a number on it [1].
Trees standing in areas that had been deliberately burned at some point in the prior decade were nearly four times as likely to survive the 2020 Castle Fire and the 2021 KNP Complex Fire [1]. Prescribed fire cut the odds of a sequoia dying by about 77 percent [1].
In absolute terms, the burns that had already been done prevented roughly 1,900 sequoia deaths [1]. Had every tree been treated, the researchers estimate another 3,900 would have lived [1].
'Prescribed burns are effective at reducing giant sequoia mortality, even for today's extreme wildfires,' said Dan Dixon, the lead author, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Davis working in Professor Yufang Jin's lab, with co-authors from the US Geological Survey and the National Park Service [1]. The work was published in Nature Communications.
Giant sequoias evolved with fire and can live three thousand years. What the study measures is how much of that inheritance can still be defended, deliberately, with a drip torch and a plan.
