[Gila_stacruz_mws] More articles about fire and invasive spp.

[Robert Emanuel]

AZ papers June and July  2005 on fire and invasive species, compiled by 
Master Watershed Steward, Deb Sparrow.


----------


<http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0624b3-env-desertdamage.html>http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0624b3-env-desertdamage.html
Invasive foliage fuels fire danger

Native plants hurt the most

Mary Jo Pitzl
The Arizona Republic
Jun. 24, 2005 12:00 AM

Invasive weeds and plants are playing a big role in fueling the "Cave Creek 
Complex" fire, Tonto National Forest officials say. And they could leave a 
barren imprint that will last long after the flames have subsided.

That's because the non-native plants bring fire to parts of the desert that 
aren't designed to burn. Species such as red brome, a grass, grew 
abundantly this year, fed by last winter's unusually heavy rains. When they 
dried out in the springtime heat, they became ripe to burn.

The non-natives fill in the spaces between desert plants, making an obvious 
conduit for fire. And that's what has been happening with the late-spring 
and early-summer wildfires that have proliferated across the lower deserts.

Forest officials say there's a double whammy to these invasive species: Not 
only do they grow fast, dry out and carry fire, they bounce back from the 
flames. Desert plants don't, said Norm Ambos, soil scientist for the Tonto 
National Forest.

He points to stretches of the Beeline Highway near Bush Highway that burned 
several years ago. The area is recovering slowly, he said.

"There's not nearly as many shrubs as you see in the desert," Ambos said. 
"A lot of saguaros have died."

Frequent fires burn up sprouting saguaro seedlings, making it nearly 
impossible for them to re-establish.

"When they're young, they're extremely vulnerable to fire," Ambos said of 
saguaros. Older saguaros can survive fire if it rips through quickly. But a 
slower-burning fire signals certain death for this signature desert plant. 
It might take a few years for the plant to collapse, but a slow fire will 
kill off the cactus.

Those saguaro seedlings that do sprout will take decades to show up on the 
landscape, said Eddie Alford, a natural-resources coordinator for the Tonto.

"It'll take 30 to 50 years before it (a saguaro) is up to where you can see 
it," Alford said.

Other desert plants are also vulnerable to fire and risk a slow recovery. 
These include palo verdes, ocotillos, brittlebush, chollas and prickly pear 
cactus, for example.

Species that are found in chaparral environments fare better, Ambos said. 
For example, catclaw, acacia and turbinella oak will return after fire. In 
fact, these fire-adapted species thrive with intermittent doses of fire, he 
said. Much of the forest burned in last year's "Willow" fire was populated 
by these fire-adapted species.

Alford sought out fire records while doing his doctorate research. The 
earliest written record he could find, he said, was 1955, leading him to 
agree with others who contend that the desert wasn't meant to burn and 
hasn't been at much risk until human intervention became more pronounced.

Alford and Ambos said the spread of invasive grasses, such as red brome, is 
too far along to be eliminated completely. The grass got its toehold in the 
desert with the onset of cattle grazing. Some have suggested that cattle 
are the answer: Just put a herd on the range and let it much the invasive 
species.

But Alford said that's not a realistic solution.

Ambos said the best bet is to concentrate on the desert areas most at risk 
of human-caused fires, such as treating roadsides with herbicide. Closing 
areas to human entry is another effective option, he said, and one that the 
Forest Service employs when a wildfire threat looms large.


<http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/opinions/articles/0704monlets041.html>http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/opinions/articles/0704monlets041.html
Loss of 'Great One' highlights problems

Jul. 4, 2005 12:00 AM

Regarding "Arizona wildfire scorches 'Grand One,' " (Republic, Wednesday):

Losing one of Earth's largest saguaros to flames tragically dramatizes how 
invasive, exotic weeds are changing our deserts. Fire kills natural 
deserts; they did not co-evolve. No desert species relies on fire for 
regeneration.

Exotic weeds - like Mediterranean red brome, African buffelgrass and Sahara 
mustard - are invading our deserts. Vehicles, livestock and wind carry 
their seeds, and nitrogen fallout from air pollution helps fuel their growth.

Weeds flourish in wet cycles but wither and dry by summer. Everywhere weeds 
sprout in spring; they invite wildfire in summer. A tinder-dry carpet of 
weeds crowds the natural open spaces between cactuses and native plants, 
carrying fire.

The Cave Creek lighting-sparked fire in the Tonto National Forest has been 
harmful to the Sonoran Desert. Red brome, a problem in the Tonto, likely 
carried fire right up to the "Great One."

We'll either work to curb weed invasions in our deserts, or keep on 
burning. -Daniel R. Patterson, Tucson



<http://www.azcentral.com/php-bin/clicktrack/print.php?referer=http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/scottsdale/articles/0624sr-fire24environmentZ8.html>http://www.azcentral.com/php-bin/clicktrack/print.php?referer=http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/scottsdale/articles/0624sr-fire24environmentZ8.html
Native desert plants not adaptable to fire


Doug Haller
The Arizona Republic
Jun. 24, 2005 12:00 AM

SCOTTSDALE - The wildfire near the Carefree-Cave Creek area has the 
potential to alter the landscape permanently, particularly in the lowland 
desert.

The Sonoran Desert's largest saguaros are close to 200 years old. They are 
slow-maturing, needing 10 years to grow an inch, requiring 75 to produce an 
arm.

They will disappear for decades, as will the palo verde trees, which often 
thrive for more than 100 years and sometimes live for as long as 400.

"The palo verdes and saguaros (will be) changed for a long, long time," 
said Joe McAuliffe, director of research at the Desert Botanical Garden in 
Phoenix. "It's a long-term, devastating impact."

A wet winter triggered the problem, allowing invasive grasses and weeds to 
flourish and shifting wildfire fears from the forests to the lowland deserts.

Unlike the forests, desert plants are not adapted to fire. Researchers 
didn't find evidence of desert wildfires until nearly 30 years ago, when 
invasive grasses proliferated to an extent that they could wipe out desert 
landscapes.

The grasses grow up and around native plants and, when dried out, act as 
kindling, which feeds the wildfires. "Something like red brome dries up and 
stands there like a bunch of thin strands of straw," McAuliffe said.

Add fire, and the desert's beauty disappears.

"Many people (who live in that) area paid a lot of money to have that 
diverse Sonoran environment as a backdrop to their houses," McAuliffe said.

The fire's effect on wildlife is more encouraging.

Stan Cunningham, a research biologist for the Arizona Game and Fish 
Department, has studied fire and wildlife for eight years.

After the massive "Rodeo-Chediski" fire in 2002, he led a group of 20 into 
the charred region for a two-day search.

All they found were two dead elk, two dead bears, a few dead squirrels and 
not much else.

"We saw 100 times more live wildlife back in the burned area," Cunningham 
said. "I don't know how they do it. . . . They just have a remarkable 
ability to get out of the way. They hunker down, crawl into holes and escape."

But eventually, the animals return and find their habitat has changed. 
That's when problems surface, Cunningham said. Two to three months after a 
fire, starvation becomes an issue.

"Animals have a social system," Cunningham said. "They live in certain 
areas, and they're not very neighborly. They're not really willing to share 
their groceries with others.

"If there's (a chance) for mortality, this is when it occurs."



<http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/wildfire/82500.php>http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/wildfire/82500.php
Published: 07.03.2005
Invasive species fuel lowland fires
Persistent nonnative plants change the biological face of desert areas
By Tom Beal
ARIZONA DAILY STAR

The Sonoran Desert is burning.
It's not supposed to happen, and it could signal the transformation of our 
saguaro-dominated landscape into something that more closely resembles an 
African savannah as native plants that have developed no defense to fire 
die off.

You can blame an invasion of nonnative plants for many of this year's 
low-elevation blazes.

The 55,000-acre Goldwater Fire between Ajo and Gila Bend burned through a 
landscape that hadn't known fire in 10,000 years, said plant researcher 
Julio Betancourt. He blames waist-high fields of a Mediterranean weed known 
as Sahara mustard that moved in to dwarf the creosote bushes.

The Cave Creek Fire is burning now through higher elevation grasslands 
where fire is common. But the two fires that combined to give it a roaring 
start began lower, in the northernmost range of the Sonoran Desert, where 
the desert plants were linked to each other by fields of another 
Mediterranean invader called red brome.

The Sonoran Desert never saw fire below 3,000 feet until the 1970s, when 
the invading weeds began filling in between native plants that had kept 
their distance for centuries and competed for sparse rainfall, said Mark 
Dimmitt, director of natural history at the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum.

Over centuries, desert plants learned to weather heat and drought, but fire 
was not frequent or wide-ranging enough to force adaptation. Unlike plants 
that evolved with fire, they did not develop thick bark or cork layers to 
protect delicate tissue, and are easily killed.

The foothills palo verde, whose chlorophyll-filled bark is thinner than a 
succulent leaf, is particularly vulnerable. If fire girdles its thin bark, 
it's a goner. Its mortality rate in a good burn is 100 percent.

The saguaro, whose conductive tissue lies just beneath its waxy cuticle and 
whose dried needles easily flame up to scorch its tender green flesh, is 
also quite vulnerable, Dimmitt said.

Scientists have kept an inventory of native and nonnative species since the 
Desert Laboratory's establishment in 1903. The first count, in 1906, listed 
three nonnatives. In 2005, the number was 44.

The trick is identifying the ones that have the most potential for harm, 
said Betancourt, a senior scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey who 
works at the Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill in Tucson.

In the Tucson area, the threat comes from buffelgrass, a North African 
species brought to the region as forage and now a principal fuel in 
roadside brush fires.

About 30 percent of Tumamoc Hill's 860 acres are thick with buffelgrass, 
said Travis Bean, senior research specialist at the Desert Laboratory. 
Nearby Sentinel Peak is infested to an equal or greater extent, he said.

And it is climbing the slopes of the Tucson Mountains and the Santa Catalinas.

Buffelgrass has 10 times the mass needed to carry fire in the desert, Bean 
said. He documented it as the fuel in five major brush fires in the Tucson 
area since May 5, including a May 30 fire that burned along two miles of 
Interstate 10 near the Houghton Road exit, he said.

Dimmitt bristles when fires are identified simply as burning through brush 
or grass because it leads people to believe they are a natural occurrence 
after a wet winter produces abundant wildflowers and other native vegetation.

Native plants, even when a wet year brings them out in profusion, lack the 
mass of the invaders and rarely burn, he said. "They disintegrate when they 
dry out."

Red brome, inadvertently introduced to the United States as a seed 
contaminant, was the most prolific of several invasive species that caused 
the Cave Creek Fire's rapid development, said Norm Ambos, forest soil 
scientist for the Tonto National Forest. It was also the main fuel in two 
other fires that burned near Roosevelt Lake this year. It has been carrying 
fires in the Tonto since the early '90s, he said.

Only 10 percent of the Cave Creek fire burned through the Sonoran Desert 
zone of giant saguaros and palo verdes, but much of that landscape may not 
recover, he said.

"I've seen areas where it's going to end up killing 90 percent of the 
saguaros," Ambos said.

The fire also burned through areas that had fire in them just last year, 
Ambos said. The red brome had come back thick enough to burn again.

Successive fires are the scary part of the scenario, said the Desert 
Museum's Dimmitt. Fire kills mature native plants and successive ones keep 
juveniles from returning. The nonnatives quickly fill in. "These fires in 
the desert really convert it to a monocultural wasteland," Dimmitt said.

Betancourt, who joined with other scientists recently to have buffelgrass 
listed by the state as a "noxious weed," said it's not too late to do 
something about the invasion. Programs at the Desert Laboratory and in 
nearby Saguaro National Park are studying effective eradication methods.

But Betancourt says the battle against buffelgrass and other nonnatives 
needs a full-fledged push - a "state Department of Invasive Species Control."

People need to be made aware of the threat posed by nonnative species and 
scientists need to identify the biggest threats sooner, said John Hall, 
Sonoran Desert program director for the Nature Conservancy, which has its 
own programs for invasive-species control.

This year could be an educational one as fires burn where they're not 
supposed to burn, he said. It's important to not dismiss them as an obvious 
consequence of a wet winter.

"The solution is not blaming the rain," Hall said.


Contact reporter Tom Beal at 573-4158 or 
<mailto:tbeal at azstarnet.com>tbeal at azstarnet.com.



All content copyright © 1999-2005 AzStarNet, Arizona Daily Star and its 
wire services and suppliers and may not be republished without permission. 
All rights reserved. Any copying, redistribution, or retransmission of any 
of the contents of this service without the expressed written consent of 
Arizona Daily Star or AzStarNet is prohibited.

  <http://www.azstarnet.com/dailystar/relatedarticles/64028.php>http://www.azstarnet.com/dailystar/relatedarticles/64028.php




Published: 03.04.2005

Buffelgrass unwelcome here
Non-native pest has a lot going against it
By Mitch Tobin
ARIZONA DAILY STAR

Compared with a bulldozer blading the desert, a bunch of roadside weeds may 
not seem like much of a menace to Southern Arizona's ecology.

But to many local scientists, an ongoing invasion of non-native buffelgrass 
poses as big a threat as habitat loss due to development.

Besides outcompeting native plants, buffelgrass grows so thick that it can 
carry super-hot fires across the Sonoran Desert, where cacti and critters 
never evolved with flames. Homes and humans also may be put at risk.

The grass, once largely restricted to road shoulders around Tucson, is now 
carpeting lands otherwise protected as parks and national monuments.

So the announcement today that Arizona is declaring buffelgrass a "noxious 
weed" is good news to those fighting the invader.

"I think this is the worst problem facing the Sonoran Desert right now, bar 
none," said Julio Betancourt, senior scientist with the U.S. Geological 
Survey. "It could literally get to the level where this becomes an 
Africanized grassland that burns every season."

The noxious label makes it illegal to import buffelgrass seed into Arizona. 
That's considered an important step since government-funded researchers 
have cultivated even hardier strains in south Texas, where buffelgrass is 
the most important forage plant for cattle.

Local groups also hope the move will raise public awareness and attract 
funding to map and eradicate the species.

"It's fantastic news. It's been a long battle and struggle to get the 
attention of the state," said Barb Skye Siegel, founder of the Sonoran 
Desert Weedwackers, which has uprooted 26 tons of non-native plants since 
2002.

The Arizona Department of Agriculture is especially worried about the fire 
danger created by the grass, which often grows by utility poles, 
spokeswoman Katie Decker said.

The label won't compel agencies to remove the weed, but "if someone were to 
plant it, we have the authority to go out and kill it," Decker said.

Experts say blazes in the Tucson basin described as "brush fires" are often 
fueled by buffelgrass, which turns brown and flammable in dry spells.

"It definitely is a problem and we expect it to be an even greater problem 
this year with all the moisture," said Katy Heiden, spokeswoman for the 
Northwest Fire/Rescue District.

Wildfires are a natural part of Arizona's grasslands, mid-elevation 
woodlands and mountaintop forests. But they're not supposed to burn in the 
desert, where fuel is naturally sparse.

Saguaros, ironwoods and palo verdes - and the animals that depend on them - 
stand little chance against flames. Researchers found 28 percent of 
saguaros and 12 percent of adult female tortoises died after 1,150 acres 
were scorched in a 1994 fire at Saguaro National Park East. That blaze was 
fueled by red brome, another non-native grass that usually burns far less 
intensely than buffelgrass.

Invasive species are second only to direct habitat loss in endangering 
ecosystems, said John Hall, Sonoran Desert program manager for The Nature 
Conservancy in Tucson.

Buffelgrass shows how the two trends can interact, he said. The plant 
disperses along roadways, and humans supplement lightning as a trigger for 
fires.

Buffelgrass evolved with fire in its native range and has since been sown 
across millions of acres in Texas and Sonora. Arizona ecologists say the 
U.S. government has been working at cross-purposes by simultaneously 
funding weed-whacking on public lands here and research on more 
cold-tolerant strains of buffelgrass in Texas.

Such contradictions are common with non-native plants, said Chris Dionigi, 
assistant director of the National Invasive Species Council. The group, 
chaired by the secretaries of agriculture, commerce and interior, was 
formed by President Bill Clinton in 1999.

"If your constituency is farmers and ranchers in a place like Texas - where 
buffelgrass is forage - if you do something to increase its 
winter-hardiness, you've met your mandate," he said. "But if that same 
grass gets into some other area and is able to grow at higher altitudes or 
farther north, you might end up with a better weed.

"A certain amount of that is always going to happen," he said. "There are 
sometimes intersecting mandates."

State and federal scientists have spent 40 years studying the species in 
Texas, where "ranchers love the grass," said Byron Burson, a geneticist 
with the Agricultural Research Service in College Station.

Texas researchers cultivated buffelgrass that's more tolerant of cold 
snaps, but the strain is a poor seed producer. In response to complaints 
from Arizona, "we've pretty well backed off trying to develop anything like 
that," Burson said.

Buffelgrass was introduced to the Tucson area around 1940, but it has 
proliferated only in the last decade or two. Roads make good homes since 
the grass is nourished by runoff and kept warm by heat-trapping asphalt. In 
the desert, the plant prefers steep, rocky hillsides, said Mark Dimmitt, 
director of natural history at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum.

"It's able to produce new shoots and seeds very rapidly, even after light 
rains," he said. "Its aggressive roots outcompete most desert plants."

Getting rid of the weed isn't impossible - or cheap.

Cattle like to eat the grass, but scientists say cows could do more harm 
than good if they also munch native plants.

An ongoing study at Saguaro National Park has found pulling the grass, 
hitting it with weed whackers and applying herbicide all work, but several 
treatments are needed. Herbicides are a fraction of the cost of the other 
options, said Todd Esque, a U.S. Geological Survey ecologist leading the 
project.

"I grew up with Rachel Carson and 'Silent Spring,' so I'm not an unlimited 
advocate of using herbicides," he said.

But the problem has become so bad that using chemicals may be unavoidable, 
he said.

"It's no longer just a roadside weed, which people were hoping it would 
remain 10 years ago," he said. "It's now well-known that it has established 
itself in the backcountry.

"Now that the horse has left the barn," he said, "we've got a much bigger 
problem."

? Contact reporter Mitch Tobin at 573-4185 or 
<mailto:mtobin at azstarnet.com>mtobin at azstarnet.com.



All content copyright © 1999-2005 AzStarNet, Arizona Daily Star and its 
wire services and suppliers and may not be republished without permission. 
All rights reserved. Any copying, redistribution, or retransmission of any 
of the contents of this service without the expressed written consent of 
Arizona Daily Star or AzStarNet is prohibited.

Robert M. Emanuel
Statewide Program Coordinator
Arizona Master Watershed Steward Program
University of Arizona Cooperative Extension
301 Forbes Building
Tucson, AZ 85721
(520) 621-1268
http://cals.arizona.edu/watershedsteward/  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://CALS.arizona.edu/pipermail/gila_stacruz_mws/attachments/20050705/c9c932a0/attachment-0001.html