Posted in ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, FEATURES, REGION, RESEARCH, WATER, WILDLIFE, tagged Anthropocene, ash, Ashland, Ashland Creek, Ashland Forest Resiliency Stewardship Project, brush, carbon emissions, Chris Chambers, climate change, conifers, controlled burns, Covering Climate Now, ECOLOGY, Elkhorn Mountains, fire, firebreak, forest, fuel load, global warming, greenhouse gas emissions, Jackson County, John Saltenberger, John Stromberg, Joint Chiefs’ Landscape Restoration Partnership, land use, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, Logging, Lomakatsi Restoration Project, Long Draw Fire, lumber, mudslide, NATIONAL PARK SERVICE, Nature Conservancy, Northwest Interagency Coordination Center, Oregon, Oregon Department of Forestry, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Park, Paul Hessburg, Reeder Reservoir, Rogue River Valley, Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest, SILVIS Lab, Siskiyou Mountains, smoke, Timothy A. Schuler, Tracy Peddicord, tree, U.S. Forest Service, understory, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Washington, Water, Wenatchee, wildfire, Wildfire Mitigation Commission, wildland–urban interface, WUI on September 18, 2019|
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BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER
An ambitious forest restoration project in Ashland, Oregon, aims to reduce the risk that wildfire poses to residents—and their water supply.
This week, LAM is joining more than 250 media outlets for Covering Climate Now, flooding the zone, as it were, with climate coverage in the run-up to the United Nations Climate Action Summit on September 23. Landscape and landscape architecture are deeply implicated in the future of climate progress, or a lack of it. Over the past decade, LAM has dug into climate issues of landscape in numerous dimensions, mapping the big resource picture as well as local attempts to fend off increasingly apparent hazards of global warming—from the procurement of materials to the integrity of the food supply chain. Each day this week we’ll bring you excellent stories from recent years that follow landscape architects acting and thinking about climate change and the landscape.
Though the warning signs had been present for months, the bad news officially came in March 2018, when forecasters at the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center (NWCC) in Portland, Oregon, released their long-range forecast of the upcoming fire season. Though it varied from state to state, in Oregon, light snowpack and higher-than-average temperatures combined to create a highly combustible landscape. “I’m worried about the 2018 fire season,” John Saltenberger, the fire weather program manager at the NWCC, told a Portland television station.
It was discouraging news for a state that, like California and other western states, has seen a growing number of increasingly intense wildfires in recent years. According to Oregon Department of Forestry statistics, 69 percent of the state’s largest recorded wildfires have occurred in the past 20 years. The largest, 2012’s Long Draw Fire, scorched nearly 560,000 acres of predominantly federal land in the southeastern part of the state. In the geological age known as the Anthropocene, the current epoch might one day be known as the Era of Megafires. A megafire is typically defined as a single wildfire that exceeds 100,000 acres. Such fires are “nearly commonplace now,” says Chris Chambers, who for the past 15 years has served as the forest division chief for the City of Ashland, Oregon. “Whereas 20, 30 years ago, a 100,000-acre fire was unheard of.” (more…)
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