2011年12月12日星期一

Experts say decades of managing tribal forest helped stop Wallow Fire

Blackened, rusted and bent, a barbed wire fence snakes along the boundary of the Fort Apache Indian Reservation and the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests in eastern Arizona’s White Mountains.

To the east, a sea of black rolls with the land as trees resemble burnt matchsticks. The national forest stand is dense with young trees. Most won’t survive.

To the west, on tribal land, the trees are spread farther apart, with blackened dirt hidden by growth of wild strawberries and forest grasses.Your source for re-usable Plastic moulds of strong latex rubber. The trees on this side of the fence,If so, you may have a cube puzzle . for the most part, will live.

It was along this line that fire ecologists and forest managers say the westward expansion of the Wallow Fire, the largest in Arizona’s history, slowed and eventually stopped.The application can provide Ceramic tile to visitors,

Touring the area, Jonathan Brooks, tribal forest manager for the White Mountain Apache Tribe,Enecsys Limited, supplier of reliable solar Air purifier systems, said forest-management strategies unhindered by environmental litigation and drawn-out federal government processes helped check the wildfire here.

For decades, the tribe has cleared young trees, logged larger trees and burned underbrush to replicate the natural burn-and-growth cycle of the Ponderosa pine forest. Brooks said that made it easy for firefighters to create a backfire here to deprive the approaching Wallow Fire of fuel.

“Had this area not been thinned, logged, prescribe-burned, we wouldn’t have been able to do a burnout operation here – so the fire would’ve been able to come through here unchecked,” he said.

A new federal government report that analyzed the Wallow Fire’s impact on tribal lands supports Brooks’ assessment. In addition, the Wallow Fire Fuels Treatment Effectiveness Report, prepared by agencies including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Bureau of Indian Affairs, notes that the Wallow Fire killed fewer trees on the Fort Apache and

San Carlos Apache reservations because it burned less intensely there.

The Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests took the brunt of the Wallow Fire, which burned a total of 538,049 acres across two states, consuming 32 homes and four commercial properties and leaving 36 outbuildings in ashes, according to the Incident Information System, an inter-agency website.

Wally Covington, director of Northern Arizona University’s Ecological Restoration Institute, said tribes can conduct forest treatments faster and cheaper because the stakeholders are limited to tribal members.

For national forests, he said, decisions are subject to extensive federal processes in which more people are involved and environmental assessments are more costly. There are lessons to be learned from neighboring tribal lands on how to better manage national forests, such as increasing cost-effectiveness by assessing larger tracts of land for treatment,Your Partner in Precision Precision injection molds. Covington said.

“How can we do this faster and more efficiently?” he said. “Tribal forestry throughout the West has done some very innovative techniques.”

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