Currently in the middle of testing for Nitrogen on our Deep Water Sample (and re-doing our Outflow Sample, for consistency’s sake) and the first part of the lab is to “digest” our water sample and that requires a half-hour waiting time to sit and do nothing except watching a liquid bubble (and write blog posts!)

Last week, our Visiting Lecture was regarding Fire Ecology, using the Rim Fire that occurred in the Sierra Nevada in August of 2013. Quite different from the first talk, which was quite technical, this lecture was actually a lot of review (and some new stuff) for me. When I worked at Philmont in the News and Photo office last summer, I had several  news stories regarding fires and fire ecology at Philmont (Rocky Mountains in New Mexico).

The speaker talked a lot about high intensity fires, and one of the things he kept reiterating was that there is rarely a 100% mortality rate in even high intensity fires, and you can usually see the spots where trees (or parts of trees) are dead. His point of course was that fires are naturally occurring and necessary to stimulate forest plant growth. One surprising thing that he shared was that old growth forests are actually less likely to burn than recently burned forests that have started regenerating plant growth. The other surprising thing I remember him saying is that with global warming, there is no correlation (positive or negative) to increased high intensity fires.

The talk was quite a bit shorter, and a good deal more accessible to those community members (and us) who are not professional scientists or researchers. I personally wanted to ask him about Philmont’s Ponil Complex Fire from 2002 and ask why they are still having trouble getting regrowth to happen, whether it might be from human involvement (it actually slows down rather than speeds up natural fire regeneration) or if a fire can actually be so intense as to naturally sterilize large swatches of land.

Until Next Time,

Joe