Can we talk fire? I know controlled burns are beneficial and the recovery from even a wildfire can be beneficial over time...but... What had been your experiences with how long it took to recover? Does the time of year (e.g. during the summer v winter) extend that recovery? In an area where there has been a major habitat impact (e.g. every few years one seems to target national parks) what have been observations/experiences?
Yeah if there is shallow soil and the ground gets nuked by a high intensity fire or crown fire it could take a few years before you see growth that will support use.
As someone who spent 5 summers during college as a wildland fire fighter and wrote my masters thesis on wildland fire and vegetation recovery I can tell you burns are great tools to manage resources if done correctly. If done wrong it could mess things. When done professionally they usually have a % of mortality they feel is acceptable for mature trees. Depending on where you live you won't want to burn during the "fire" season or you could risk losing the fire. That's why many places burn in the spring and fall so they can have slow moving low intensity fires. This allows addition nutrients to be released into the soil. High intensity fires risk damaging the soils so that's why they try to keep them low. The county I live in had a big wild fire in the spring of 2013. By July the whole burn was bright green. I was told the next spring some people had a lot of luck looking for sheds in that burn. But every vegetation is going to recovery differently and at different rates depending on the intensity of the fire. You also have to think about what you consider as recovered? Is it just green growth? Or if you kill a 10 year old tree in the burn is the replacement of another 10 year old tree going to have to take place?
