![]() ![]() Temperatures are expected to climb from near 100 degrees on Saturday to 106 by Monday. The weather service reports that most of eastern Montana is under an excessive heat watch from Saturday afternoon through Wednesday night. Gusty winds up to 30 miles an hour, with low humidity combined with scattered wet and dry thunderstorm lightning strikes will create critical fire conditions.Ī red flag warning means that critical fire conditions are either occurring or will shortly. The National Weather Service has a red flag warning in effect until 9 p.m. As of Wednesday afternoon, the Alder Creek Fire is burning more than 2,400 acres in the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest. If a hotter, drier climate is unsuitable for those trees to come back, "they won't recover,” she added.The Beaverhead County Sheriff’s Office has issued an evacuation order for all 17 houses in the Alder Creek area as a nearby wildfire burns south of highway 43 and the Wise River. “We have a lot of places that are probably climatically different than when those (conifer) species were established," she said, which means they can struggle when trying to recover after a burn. ![]() One 2018 study in the journal Ecology Letters that looked at nearly 1,500 wildfire sites found that because of hotter and drier climates, fewer forests are returning to their pre-burn tree mix, and in some cases trees did not return at all.Ĭamille Stevens-Rumann, an assistant professor at Colorado State University and co-author of the study, said wildfires have become larger and more intense, killing more trees, while also happening more frequently. The effects of climate change can be significant on forest regeneration. Firefighters used helicopters to dump water on the fire, which burned across rugged terrain. ![]() News reports and press releases from June and July 2021 attributed the wildfire to a lightning strike and said the nearly 600-acre blaze fanned by winds forced evacuations and cut off access to nearby roads, hiking trails and campgrounds. Whitney, at 14,505 feet the highest mountain the contiguous United States - is home to Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep, an endangered species, and to the whitebark pine, an endangered species candidate. The area of the blaze - not far from the trailhead to Mt. Some species only flower after a wildfire. The tiny, fragile flowers and patches of fresh growth against a stark mountainside and slabs of gray rock were a reminder that wildfire is part of the ecosystem in California, including the eastern Sierra Nevada where the fire took place.įirefighters said they used minimum-impact techniques to fight the blaze because “natural fire plays an important role in maintaining the landscape within these areas.” Sometimes, it’s up to foresters to go in and replant them. “The conifer trees don’t come back very quickly,” Ellsworth said, referring to certain pines and other trees that bear cones. One stand of pinyon pines was heavily damaged – needles burned off the branches, their trunks torched black – and will not come back. ![]() Forest Service.īut it can be five years before the ground cover returns to what it was before the blaze. “Some of the shrub species and other grass species are more fire-adapted, and they can come back quicker,” said Todd Ellsworth, a post-fire restoration program manager with the U.S. The first plants to reappear after a burn typically have grown more resistant over time to the flames. Some of the towering trees on the hillside are dead, others only singed and can recover. House Approves Bill to Help West Fight Wildfires, DroughtĪs it roars across the landscape, a fire burns at different intensities. ![]()
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