{"id":5622,"date":"2015-12-13T15:04:52","date_gmt":"2015-12-13T20:04:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.elca.org\/faithlens\/?p=5622"},"modified":"2016-01-07T15:07:36","modified_gmt":"2016-01-07T20:07:36","slug":"december-13-2105-fire-and-the-seeds-to-bear-fruit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.elca.org\/faithlens\/december-13-2105-fire-and-the-seeds-to-bear-fruit\/","title":{"rendered":"December 13, 2105, Fire and the Seeds to Bear Fruit"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bryan Jaster, Winchester, VA<\/p>\n

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Warm-up Question<\/strong><\/p>\n

What\u2019s the largest fire you\u2019ve ever seen? \u00a0Did anything bad or good result?<\/p>\n

Fire the Seeds to Bear Fruit
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By now most of us get it, or have at least heard it: fires are good for the forest. But what does that mean? University of Minnesota forest ecologist\u00a0Lee Frelich<\/a>\u00a0can help. He explains what the Boundary Waters Canoe Area would look like if fire were somehow completely controlled for the last century. The short answer: a sea of half-dead Christmas trees.<\/p>\n

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“You would get essentially a sea of\u00a0Balsam Fir<\/a>, then the budworm would come, and it goes out and kind of kills half the trees,” Frelich explains. “So you’d have this kind of crappy, half-dead forest which is full of brush and branches and which is not very attractive for people or wildlife.”<\/p>\n

But that is really just explaining why an absence of fire can be bad. One fascinating and little known piece of the fire ecology puzzle are the species of trees that actually fire\u00a0dependent. The\u00a0Jack Pine<\/a>\u00a0has closed cones that only open to release their seeds when waxes on the cone melt in the heat of a fire.<\/p>\n

“Camping in the Boundary Waters,” Frelich says, “I’ve taken twigs with cones on them from the forest floor and put them next to the campfire. They are exposed to the heat and they wait 10 or 20 minutes, then they pop open. The next morning you can shake that twig and the seeds will fall out. They are kind of programmed to wait a little bit, you know, because if the seeds fall directly into the fire, they\u2019ll be consumed.<\/p>\n

“The seeds fall over the next few days, so they\u2019re likely to land on a forest floor that is no longer on fire. In the case of the jack pine, the seeds germinate much better if the leaf litter has been burned away. Jack Pine, in fact, has drier foliage than other species of trees which makes it easier for a fire to run through Jack Pine. It is almost as if they purposely promote fire.”<\/p>\n

There is a whole system in the BWCA, Frelich says, that is adapted to fire. Another wonder of fire ecology:\u00a0Bicknell’s Geranium<\/a>. Its seeds will only germinate in sunlight. Buried under leaf litter, the seeds just wait for it to be burned away. After the 2006 Cavity Lake Fire in the BWCA, which burned 32,000 acres, the wild geraniums were everywhere. “That site had last burned in 1801,” Frelich says. “Those were 200-year-old seeds germinating.”<\/p>\n

For full article:\u00a0 https:\/\/www.minnpost.com\/intelligencer\/2011\/09\/why-forest-fires-are-good-and-amazing\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

Discussion Questions<\/strong><\/p>\n