Fire + Water: The Dance Of A Balanced Ecosystem
An ecosystem is a biological dance — a community of living organisms interacting with their environment in a symbiotic balance. The forest ecosystem is rooted in a dependency on both fire and water, but too much or too little of one or the other can be detrimental.
Colorado’s climate has become an ever-shifting imbalance; it’s historically hot and dry, and large fires blaze through hillsides at alarming rates, scorching forests, destroying wilderness, depleting resources and threatening life. Climate change is one of the driving forces behind these fires in addition to, unfortunately, human negligence. Understanding the relationship between fire and water is the first step towards promoting a healthy forest ecosystem.
Photos by Kamie Long
Fire
It’s no secret that Colorado, along with much of the western United States, has seen an increase in fierce burns. The popular narrative around wildfires says they’re inherently bad, but this is not entirely true. Casey Cooley, Colorado Parks and Wildlife forest habitat coordinator, shares that the forest can actually benefit from fire.
“Natural fire benefits the forest ecosystem by replenishing the forest with vital nutrients, mainly carbon, from the burning of older vegetation. This burning helps create forest biodiversity with openings in the forest canopy that allows additional sunlight to reach the forest floor, allowing grasses, shrubs and flowers to flourish,” he says. “Burned forests also create dead trees that attract insects and wildlife to them.”
According to Tim Kroening, Colorado Parks and Wildlife area wildlife manager, Colorado’s animals are impressively resilient and surprisingly dependent on wildfires. “Our wildlife has adapted to fire over time and knows how to get in and out of their homes just like we do. Unfortunately, there is often some wildlife loss with just about every wildfire. But, the overall population is not negatively impacted. Wildlife will actually benefit from wildfires,” Kroening states. “For a variety of reasons, fire does not burn evenly through the landscape… This is an interesting phenomenon that ultimately creates edge habitat [where one type of habitat meets another] for wildlife, and it’s why we often say that wildfire is good for wildlife.”
Because the forest ecosystem can benefit from frequent, low-intensity fires, there are negative effects that can arise in the absence of flames. Fire suppression has been a debated topic in the forestry community for ages. Dr. Ethan Bucholz, academic liaison experiential learning specialist for Colorado State Forest Service and Warner College at Colorado State University, explains that after the Big Burn of 1910 the National Forest Service got very good at putting out wildfires, but this resulted in a new problem — acres of forest begging to be burned.
Fire suppression altered the natural disturbance processes in the forests, and we are now seeing areas that historically would burn slowly and regrow being destroyed by fiercer fires. When multiple burn cycles are missed and the forest, in turn, burns more severely than it would have, regeneration is acutely challenged.
The benefits of slow-burning fire and the history of fire suppression demonstrate the necessity of letting some fires safely burn. There are fires, however, that dance on the line between beneficial and devastating, such as the enormous, fast-burning fires we have seen completely denuding forests and threatening the lives of humans and wildlife.
“Fire becomes devastating to forest ecosystems when it occurs at unnatural frequencies and burns at a higher severity. Take ponderosa pine forest for example. Humans have disrupted that natural fire frequency by putting out natural fires that would have burned at a lower severity. This has led ponderosa pine forests in Colorado to become unnaturally dense with trees and other vegetation. Our current forest conditions have led to larger, hotter fires. Increasing temperatures and droughts allow fires to burn further into the calendar year. These factors are why we see larger, hotter forest fires in Colorado,” Cooley says.
Unnatural fires are a great cause for concern. According to research by the United States Forest Service, nearly 85% of wildfires in the U.S. are caused by humans — by acts such as not drowning a campfire correctly, negligent use of machinery or improper disposal of cigarettes. Complacency while recreating in the forest leads to disasters which become exceptionally hard to contain due to climatic conditions.
Water
The role of water in the forest ecosystem is vital and complex. The National Drought Mitigation Center estimates that much of Western Colorado is currently in a severe to extreme drought. Their statistics also say that 2022 has been one of the driest years in the past 128.
“Most immediately, drought, especially severe drought, can cause direct mortality to wildlife through dehydration or heatwaves, pushing their bodies to the limits. Populations of animals such as deer and bighorn sheep tend to have fewer offspring born or survive their first years during a drought,” Scott Dunn, community programs manager at Walking Mountains Science Center, explains.
“Droughts also tend to cause migrations of animals searching for more suitable habitat, causing increased pressure on new areas and potentially increasing the spread of disease as populations live in closer contact or are forced to share dirtier water,” Dunn adds. Cooley explains that with less moisture, native vegetation has a more difficult time growing and can be replaced by nonnative plants. Plus, the vegetation has less time to reproduce and decompose.
“The connections between climate change and Colorado’s droughts and wildfires are extremely complex and nuanced. There are natural drought and fire cycles at work in the West, but a shifting climate results in the extremes of these natural cycles expanding,” Dunn shares. Drought disrupts the organic flow of the ecosystem and is often the precursor to wildfire, because dryness primes the vegetation to burn.
Fast-burning fires turn vegetation and soil to ash and alter the quality of the water. Dr. Ashley Rust, Colorado Parks and Wildlife water quality monitoring and assessment specialist, notes that streams and lakes near disastrous wildfires can take five to 10 years to recover. “Most large fires will impact the water quality by delivering displaced sediment from the burned hillsides to the streams. The sediment will be eroded from the hillsides after rain events physically dislodge the dirt, and this will cause the streams to be more turbid after each storm,” she illustrates as just one way in which streams are affected from fire.
When one element is thrown out of balance, we often see the other element out of balance, as well. It’s common to see flooding after fires, which causes another set of issues for the ecosystem and surrounding infrastructure. “When soil is severely burned, that can, in certain instances, alter its properties such that water does not infiltrate as well into the soil,” Dr. Bucholz explains. “The lack of vegetative cover, plus dumping a deluge of water onto a fresh burned surface, can lead to flooding.”
“[Flooding] challenges our reservoirs; it challenges the systems that we have in place to filter, to draw water out to use for municipal services,” Dr. Bucholz remarks. As he points out, Colorado is a headwater state — meaning surrounding states receive water from the centennial state. If Colorado has a water quality or quantity issue, downstream users will feel that pain, as well.
The Dance
The thirsty atmosphere sets the stage for unnatural fires to rage, and human carelessness and complacency can further the catastrophic consequences on an ecosystem subject to human influence. Enjoy the forest while being responsible and respectful; understand that the forest you’re seeing is a dynamic system of elements that is balancing the needs of nature and people far beyond what your eye can see. Dunn recommends following these principles:
Plan ahead and prepare. Know the regulations for the area you'll visit (the National Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management lists fire restrictions for specific areas on their websites).
Travel and camp on durable surfaces.
Dispose of waste properly.
Leave what you find.
Minimize campfire impacts (make sure all embers and sticks are wet and cool).
Respect wildlife.
Be considerate of other visitors.
Every time humans enter the forests, they alter the dance of the ecosystem, for better or for worse. The unprecedented conditions create a variety of challenges when it comes to fire and water but also opportunities to learn about and adore our forest ecosystems for generations to come.
Originally published in the Fall 2022 issue of Spoke+Blossom.