“We can watch it recover slowly, but those old-growth Joshua tree woodlands and shrublands, we won’t see those again in our lifetimes.”Ĭalifornia’s other big fire of the year - the Bonny fire, which has charred 2,300 acres in Riverside County - is also burning across some arid landscapes as well as through the mountains. “It’s kind of sad because it won’t be when we can see it,” she said. She thinks the vegetation and plants will recover from the fire, but probably very slowly - too slowly for one person to witness in their lifetime, she said. “In those desert areas, the mountains are like sky islands, they call them,” she said - they rise from the “sea” of the hot desert floor that surrounds them and host dramatically different populations of plants and animals. The New York Mountains in the Mojave National Preserve have an enormous density of rare plants, including blue blossom, manzanita and uncommon chaparral shrubs, that could be devastated by fire, she said. On top of that, more humans traveling into desert areas increases the risk of sparks - from a bullet glancing off a rock while someone is target shooting or a chain dragging on the pavement while someone is hauling a trailer, she said. Some models suggest that increased global temperatures as a result of climate change are bringing more rain to the Mojave desert, fueling grass growth and the risk of lightning strikes, Cunningham said. The area doesn’t have as many invasive grasses, such as red brome and cheatgrass, which are more common in low-creosote deserts, but it does have a big Sahara mustard problem, which could be adding to the fuel, she said. In the Eastern Mojave, the heavy winter rains stoked the growth of native grasses, including big galleta, said ecologist Laura Cunningham, California’s director at the Western Watersheds Project and co-founder of conservation group Basin and Range Watch. Crews and volunteers are trying to replant and revitalize those groves. The 2020 Dome fire, which burned more than 40,000 acres across the southwestern California desert - including in the national preserve, but in a different area from the York fire - destroyed an estimated 1 million Joshua trees. Track wildfire origins, perimeters and air pollution with the L.A. Hot, windy conditions further primed vegetation to burn. are fairly fuel-limited in dry years, so there was that kind of natural fire break between plants or keeping it confined to relatively small areas,” said Christopher McDonald, a natural resources advisor at UC Cooperative Extension.īut after a year of above-average rainfall, there’s more fuel connecting perennial shrubs and Joshua trees, which enables fire to spread among the plants, he said. “Most of the deserts in the southwestern U.S. Invasive grasses played a role in stoking that fire, known as the Geology fire, which burned in an area populated by Joshua trees, Mojave yucca, creosote and senna, park officials said. But at lower elevations, the rains helped more grasses grow, and then several weeks of high temperatures caused the vegetation to dry out - or cure - priming it to become wildfire fuel.Īlready, a June 10 wildfire burned more than 1,000 acres in the Pleasant Valley area of Joshua Tree National Park. For this reason, forecasters had called for a less active fire season in California’s higher-elevation forests, which are dense but remain moist from the wet winter.
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