Raging Wildfires Are Speeding Up Climate Change Dan Nosowitz - TakePart
go to original August 16, 2015

Climate Change & Wildfires Explained in Less Than Three Minutes (The White House)

California is having a very bad year, ecologically speaking. With 92 percent of the state in severe drought and wildfires raging from the Oregon border to the Mexican border, California can’t seem to catch a break. Now comes new research from the University of California, Davis, that suggests the wildfires may be accelerating the process of climate change, moving the state faster into the future.

“Our goal was to describe how forest thinning and fire are affecting the plant diversity underneath California's conifer forests,” Jens Stevens, the lead author of the paper, which was published in the Journal of Ecology, wrote in an email. “In other words, how many species do we have, and what kind of species are they?” Stevens measured a new process, recently named and not particularly thoroughly studied, called thermophilization.

Thermophilization is a term coined in 2012 to describe the predominance of species from warmer climates wresting control of habitats in which they’d normally be minorities. In other words, it seeks to describe the changes in flora that result in, say, plants more commonly seen in Mexico suddenly being found in the San Francisco Bay Area. This isn’t quite the same as plants shifting their territories or farmers moving their plants to cooler planting grounds; this isn’t a banana tree turning up somewhere it’s never been seen before, like, say, Michigan.

“The southern species are already in the area of these fires, so it's not that they're ‘moving’ necessarily, it's just that they are becoming more abundant,” Stevens wrote. The fire areas examined included the Angora Fire in 2007 and the American River Complex Fires in 2008, so the plant life has had a chance to recover. Also, many wildfires are currently burning, which does not provide a particularly nice environment for study.

Read the rest at TakePart

Related: Alaska’s Intense Wildfire Seasons Could Be Felt Worldwide (TakePart)

We invite you to add your charity or supporting organizations' news stories and coming events to PVAngels so we can share them with the world. Do it now!