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I absolutely hate the times of the year when this happens, and the smoke blows into cities and towns reducing the air quality in a profound way. At one point the smoky air was declared to be hazardous to breathe in by the EPA.
Grazing regimes? Any data that suggests high stocking rates, short grazing duration, and vice versa? Low stocking rate, give-em lots of acreage & forage? Impacts on birds?
look someone here might read this and share it...please do....MAKE A WATER BALLOON, It only needs to stay closed until it hits the tree line and rips open...you can line the bags with retardant....you can fill up from anywhere, like parking lots from fire hydrants....lakes with pumps....you can pre fill thousands and take many to the fire....most of the water is evaporated when you dump it above the fire....Also the bag just needs to be made of burnable materials...The forest is already producing mass particle toxins...they just have to be the same type of fiber materials in the bag burning.....This will put out forest fires FAST
I have a sneaking suspicion that the cattle are to blame for the degredation of sagebrush steppe in the first place. What they should have been doing is figuring out how to make the most of the tasty birds that are out there so we could have been eating those instead of hamburgers
Great teaching tool! I have never thought of just using a hay bale! I am going to add this to my Wildland Fire Management Class at the University of Idaho
Nice video complemented by great music! Wonderful to see the post-fire prairie recovery over time. Thanks for posting this - we can use this in prescribed fire education as well.
Fire is not the solution, it is only a make up of the symptons. The real Problem is the destruction of the ecosystem. Fire is a part of nature, but it is there unregular and a sporadic event. But his solution is a cycle of fire. He has it implicit right, the solution is a cycle, but which one. The fire cyle in an ecosystem is unregular. So it can not be the solution. There must be cycles broken in the steppe ecosystem, which is more important. So what is missing, since 100-150 years? Or should I say since 13 000 BC? I miss the megafauna! The solution is clear, the Restauration of the super serengenti, which the great plains were before the Arrival of humans.
Goetzim, restoration of the Pleistocene (pre-human) ecosystem is impossible for so many reasons it is impossible to list them all. Here are a few of the most important ones. 1. Foremost, and most obvious, the Pleistocene climate no longer exists. 2. The Pleistocene megafauna no longer exist (buffalo, elk, brown bear, etc. are but a pitiful remnant of the dozens of species that existed then, and in any case are actually relatively recent Eurasian immigrants). 3. The Great Plains are nearly 100% privately owned and are fully inhabited up to the human ecological carrying capacity. The remaining grasslands are nearly all devoted to range livestock production; in fact the private Great Plains grasslands account for the largest share of the U.S. beef cow herd. Now then, what to you propose to do with the people who live there now? In know for a fact, since I am one of them, that you would find them difficult to dislodge. Finally, the fire cycle in temperate grasslands is not irregular, it is extreme regular if allowed to happen. Granted, the arrival of humans in North America completely changed the fire regimen (see Stephen Pyne for more information). However, this human-mitigated fire regimen in fact created and maintained the Holocene Great Plains grasslands that you confuse with Pleistocene conditions. In the absence of human-mitigated fire, and the absence of tree destroyers such as the elephants and giant ground sloths, the area would convert to low-grade woodlands of little use to man or beast.
I am all about managing all of the parts from holistic perspective. This is why I have studied and published in peer-reviewed scientific papers on livestock production, grazing behavior, small mammals, grassland birds, insects, endangered species, nutrient cycling, water cycling, etc.. In the case of rangelands I have developed a research approach based on large landscapes that has concluded that most "parts" respond to the large-scale pattern as a "whole" that is largely driven by the fire-grazing interaction. I do not support the Holistic Management that you champion because it is not supported by science-- in fact it is refuted by science.
Don't limit the management tools you use. The eight tools for managing rangeland are money/labor, human creativity, grazing, animal impact, fire, rest, living organisms and science/technology. To be successful you need to use all these tools to the best of your ability. In other words, Holistic management as championed by Dan Dagget and Alan Savory.
