Healing power of fire
Conservancy plans controlled burns to nurture rare habitat
PLYMOUTH -- Controlled fires will consume hundreds of acres of Southeastern Massachusetts this summer -- part of an expanded effort to preserve a rare habitat and reduce the risk of forest fires.
Buoyed by a $331,000 grant from the US Forest Service, the Nature Conservancy is expanding its prescribed fire program in the Myles Standish State Forest in Plymouth, and the Massachusetts Military Reservation on Cape Cod. About 1,000 acres are slated to burn.
Setting forests on fire may seem like an odd way to help preserve the region's rare species, but the practice has proven its worth in the past.
''The ecological benefit is huge," said Joel Carlson, fire manager of the conservancy, a national organization dedicated to habitat preservation. Many plants and animals in certain ecosystems need fire to survive, he said.
In globally rare pitch pine and scrub oak barrens, for example, trees produce cones that release their seeds only when heated by fire, he said, and some animal species such as harriers (a kind of hawk), the grasshopper sparrow, and the barrens buckmoth require the bare landscape conditions following a fire to thrive.
''The primary reason [for the controlled fires] is to promote biodiversity," Carlson said, ''maintaining the pitch pine, scrub oak barren in a healthy state."
A so-called burn also reduces the risk of a more hazardous fire by removing thick underbrush, which makes the state's Bureau of Forest Fire Control enthusiastic partners with the environmentalists.
''We'd like to see this program expand and grow and do it all across the Commonwealth," said Phil Gilmore, the acting chief fire warden for the state Department of Conservation and Recreation's Bureau of Forest Fire Control. He calls it a ''proven method."
Last year, the program burned 800 acres in Southeastern Massachusetts. Because of the grant, plans call for the coverage area to increase by about 200 acres, according to Kerry Crisley, the conservancy's communications manager. The agency will also increase its training of partner members from government agencies and nonprofit groups in the techniques of the prescribed burns. The first burn at Myles Standish took place five years ago.
The timing of a controlled fire depends on the weather, with this season's first burn slated to start sometime within a six-week ''burn window" -- when area weather conditions are typically best -- that began Thursday. Thirty-six to 48 hours before the fire is set, the conservancy will inform other participants in the prescribed fire area that one has been scheduled, and will proceed if the weather cooperates.
Between 20 and 45 people typically work a burn. ''It's hard work," Carlson said. ''We use fire to control fire, water to control fire."
Teams set fires on the outer edges of the downwind side of the chosen area, then begin to burn out the inside. Wind direction and other meteorological data are carefully monitored, including how much smoke the area's air mass will hold. Carlson -- who says he has supervised 250 fires, with none getting out of control -- also monitors relative humidity, air temperature, and recent rainfall before settling on a target date.
Carlson has bossed 250 fires for the conservancy. None has ever escaped, he said.
The conservancy's fire equipment includes two fire engines, a mobile fire equipment cache, and two trailers. Those resources are augmented by the state Bureau of Forest Control and other partners. The Plymouth Fire Department has been present at past fires.
Carlson said the conservancy probably will burn a forested area on the Cape military property before turning to a rare habitat inside the 14,000-acre state forest in Plymouth and Carver.
Part of this year's plan calls for reburning a 150-acre area in the northeast part of the Myles Standish State Forest, south of Alden Road and west of Mast Road, that was originally burned two years ago. Since then an unusually high fuel load has accumulated in the forest because there have been no major fires in the area for decades, Carlson said. The area needs another treatment to put it in a condition where it would not need a fire again for 10 years.
The controlled fires mirror naturally occurring wildfires by thinning out some forest stands to make room for other plants. Without fires, the area becomes overcrowded, and some native plant species are pushed out. In the years following a fire, the habitat will be home to more low-lying vegetation, grasses and herbaceous grass-like plants characteristic of pine barrens, Carlson said.
While the trees in the barrens are burned back, they are not destroyed. ''You can't kill oak with fire," Carlson said. The fire kills the tops of the trees but the root system is intact, he said, and so the tops grow back. Pitch pine will resprout its needles after a fire.
The prescribed burn reduces the overall dominance of any one species, said Carlson, a pruning role wildfires perform in nature. 