Wildfire and Post-Fire Recovery

In this episode, we spoke with Dr. Camille Stevens-Rumann, interim director of the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute at Colorado State University and associate professor in the Department of Forest and Rangeland Stewardship. Dr. Stevens-Rumann’s research focuses broadly on disturbance ecology, including post-fire forest recovery. She examines how ecosystems respond to disturbances like wildfire, to help improve restoration and management strategies. She shares how fire regimes in the western U.S. are changing, what drives extreme wildfire events, and how the presence of a specific type of tree can help mitigate fire risk.

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Transcript

Sarah LeRoy: Welcome to Come Rain or Shine podcast of the U.S. Geological Survey, Southwest Climate Adaptation Science Center, or Southwest CASC. 

Emile Elias: and supported by New Mexico State University and the University of Arizona. We are your co-hosts, Emile Elias 

Sarah: and Sarah Leroy. Here we highlight stories to share the most recent advances in science, weather and climate adaptation, and innovative practices to support resilient landscapes and communities.

Emile: We believe that sharing some of the most innovative, forward-thinking and creative scientific research and adaptation solutions will strengthen our collective ability to respond to even the most challenging impacts of climate change in one of the hottest and driest regions of the world. 

Sarah: Today, we are speaking with Dr. Camille Stephens-Rumann, interim director of the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute at Colorado State University and associate professor in the Department of Forest and Rangeland Stewardship.

Her research is focused on post-disturbance forest recovery, and aims to understand species and ecosystem responses to disturbance – like wildfire – to improve future restoration management strategies. So welcome, Camille. I'm very thankful that you were able to join us today. And I just wanted to start with how you got into this field, because I know you kind of have a somewhat unique path to becoming a researcher.

So could you share a little bit about how you ended up as a researcher in this field? 

Camille Stevens-Rumann: Yeah, so I started my career in natural resources as a wildland firefighter working for the Forest Service. Actually, my very first job with the Forest Service was hooting for owls on a wildlife crew on the Lincoln National Forest in New Mexico.

But I started doing fire, largely because I graduated from college and really wanted to just be outside and not in a classroom. And I knew that that was something that I could do. I have two of my uncles and one of my aunts were wildland firefighters. So it wasn't so strange for me in my family to go and decide to do that as a young adult.

And what I really loved about that experience was, of course, being outside, being a part of a team, you know, as you are on a fire crew, is really critical. And also seeing how our landscapes get transformed when fires happen. And that was something that I never wanted to stop looking at, even as I decided I didn't want to necessarily be a firefighter for my whole career.

But thinking about those landscapes that I watched, very rapidly in a very short time, change, but getting to think about what that looks like on the longer term. And so that's what got me really excited about fire ecology and studying our ecosystems. 

Sarah: Excellent. Yeah, thanks for sharing that. It's I know I often hear researchers who were wildland firefighters first.

And so it's it's an interesting story. And so we'll talk about your specific research in a second. But before we get to that, I was wondering if you could just describe generally how fire is changing what we're seeing on the landscape in the western US? 

Camille: Yeah. So fire has changed a lot, even in my lifetime in the western United States.

And it, you know, when I think about fires, I think about them in terms of regimes, like what our landscapes are used to and how that is changing and that, and that there's multiple aspects of that that has changed. So one of the first designs that we saw with climate change is actually a changing of the season of fires. Right? We used to have a distinct fire season, and that's actually how our federal land management agencies operate with hiring for firefighters for specific six months of the year when fires are most active. But we see that is lengthening. And in the kind of places that are more snow, driven, or are snow dominated in the winter there, what we're seeing is a lengthening in the fall. in the southwest that we see is, a lot of earlier starts to fires and needing to have fire crews on earlier. And then we - in really in the last 20 years - we've seen an increase in the size of wildfires and also the size of high severity patches. So those areas where we see a 100% tree mortality or 100% plant mortality, has really increased as much as about 15 fold from what it was in, say, the 80s.

Especially in some areas, it's not necessarily true everywhere. But those are the big, things that are really driving kind of the ecological change that we see. Right? We've had more multiple million acre fires across the western United States, which, as well as billions of dollars cost and so on the human side, that's - those are kind of the metrics we use often is how many people are impacted and things like that.

And those costs and sizes are certainly increasing. But from the ecological perspective, we're also seeing those really high severity patches and seasons and the time of year when you wouldn't have them in the past. 

Sarah: Yeah. Thank you. So now kind of drilling down to your research, could you share, you know, what you're doing and why it's important thinking about those changing fire regimes that you just described.

Camille: So my research broadly tries to address, you know, what's happening in ecosystems after a fire, you know, kind of thinking about what that post-fire recovery trajectory might look like, as well as how management actions or, you know, preexisting conditions kind of influence the fire itself. And so when we think about what those parts are of the fire regime that are changing, I really think about kind of what that vegetation is looking like potentially for the next fire, as well as thinking about, how we are setting up our landscapes to receive the next wildfire or fire that we choose to put on the ground.

But it's really, you know, I think about almost all of the areas that I work in, even those that most people would think about as pre fire or green forest. All of the landscapes are really post-fire in some sense. Maybe it's post-fire by 300 years, but it's still – our landscapes have been shaped by fire. And so I think about, a lot of how those fires might interact with those landscapes at any given time.

Sarah: That's an interesting way - I haven't thought about that before. So now when I go on a landscape, I'm going to think, okay, this is a post-fire landscape of some kind. I like that. So thinking about your research, I know that, a lot of it's focused on bridging the gap, right, between science and management, improving management strategies. So generally speaking, how does your research help managers make restoration decisions? 

Camille: Yeah. So I engage managers in a lot of different ways. And that again kind of depends on where they are in that post-fire cycle.

Like - are they just - have they just had a fire and they're thinking about post-fire recovery and restoration, in which case they might talk about things like hill slope stabilization or planting. And then I think when we're thinking about a green forest that maybe might be impacted by a wildfire in the future, we're often talking about how we should thin a landscape, where to allocate resources, what are the best types of treatments that we want to do, or where can we kind of push the needle, potentially, thinking about climate and what those forest conditions are like today, to think about what what the we want out of those ecosystems in the future. 

Sarah: Okay. Great. And could you, would you be able to share like what management partners you work with? I'm sure it's a broad range, but if you describe a few that would be great. 

Camille: Yeah, so, we work with the - I work a lot with the national forests.

And so here, right around here where I am in Fort Collins, that's the Arapaho Roosevelt National Forest and the Pike National Forest. We also do a lot of work with, you know, kind of county land management agencies, counties have a lot of public land here in Colorado, which is a little bit unique, I think, to a lot of states, where they actually manage forest lands.

So that's things like, Jefferson County or Boulder County or here we have Larimer County. I also work with a lot of private organizations that, you know, intersect or work with federal land management in some way. So things like Trees, Water, People, which is a NGO, excuse me. That does some planting in our region as well as internationally.

The Nature Conservancy -  we have some local organizations around here that are specifically interested in the in watersheds. And so like the coalition for the Pooter River watershed, and there's many others across the Front Range of Colorado that that have that. I also work with some like private landowners that have, you know, really big parcels. So in New Mexico, some examples of that are like Vermejo Ranch and Tranchera Ranch, which are really large stakeholders in kind of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico, as well as, you know, a lot of the groups that we work with, like the our Colorado State Forest Service, doesn't actually manage a lot of their own private land, you know, like our state lands, but actually works with private landowners to do treatments. And so we work with them a lot too, you know, and those landowners that they're working with to try to implement different types of treatments. 

Sarah: So you're really working with managers at like every level of government,  private… 

Camille: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think on any given day I can talk to a person that owns one piece of land as small as like five acres, all the way to the forest supervisor of a whole national forest.

Sarah: That's. I feel that probably makes your job exciting, being able to work with all those different people. Yeah. So you have a project with the southwest CASC that recently ended. And that project is focused specifically on extreme fire spread events and what environmental factors promote or inhibit these extreme events. So could you describe that research and what you learned?

Camille: So what we were interested in is really examining what happens on the most extreme days. So we have a million acre fire or a really large fire in any of our landscapes. And that doesn't necessarily capture what's happening on a specific day. So, for example, we had here in Colorado, we had the East Troublesome and the Cameron Peak Fire in 2020 that each burned, you know, 50,000 to 100,000 acres in a single day.

While they only ended up being, you know, 100 to 200,000 acres. And so that single day is a lot of dramatic change. So we wanted to understand what was driving those, you know, single day runs, and what kind of those - the ecological consequences of those - big runs were, as well as how is there anything we can do?

Because when we have these huge events, that's not when we can do something in terms of firefighting action. So it's really, are there preemptive conditions that we can alter, like doing fuels management or forest treatments, that might have some impact when we have these extreme weather conditions and extreme days of burning. And so we had three graduate students and a postdoc kind of on this, addressing different components of it.

I think the first was just understanding what are the drivers of those extreme days, and some of the things that we know really drive them - and it changes a little bit by geography across the western United States and even into Canada - but, some measure of how arid it is and not, not just that day, like, is it a hot and dry day, but has it been a hot and dry year?

Or has it been a hot and dry couple of years? And that really sets up the, those forests especially for those really big spread events where there might be enough moisture in the system to maybe stop that in a wetter year. They can just plow right through, any sort of what once was a wet condition. 

Wind is obviously really important and really hard for us to measure. So we don't have a lot of great data on that, but we do know that that's one of the big drivers of it, of big events. But then we wanted to know, like, you know, is there either a forest structure or maybe is there something in the fuels that is, that we could change or that is on the landscape that influences how big these fires get?

And one of the really interesting things I think that came out of it was, things that we knew from anecdotes from firefighters, actually, right, who are out in the forest and observe changes like having a lot of aspen in your forest will change what the fire behavior is and actually drop that fire from a canopy to, to a surface fire.

And we actually found that across the southwestern United States that's really true, that if you have an aspen component in your forest, it's more likely to end up on the edge of a wildfire. So rather than a fire running through it, it actually serves as a bit of a barrier. And then, you know, treatments, while they're not quite as effective when we have these really extreme days, they are still doing something, which I think was a big concern, right? We're not necessarily doing forest management treatments to be successful in those really, really extreme days. But they actually are still changing the amount of trees that are dying and, you know, kind of burn severity when those fires happen. And the, the - I think the other thing on the ecological side was just that, you know, on these days that our - we're, we're seeing a lot of area burned, is also where we're seeing really high proportion of high severity again where all the trees are dead.

Which is a big concern because I think historically, you might think the fire's moving really fast, maybe it's not killing all the trees – but it is actually killing more than, say, on a less extreme day, which is concerning, again, if you're talking about huge patches of 50,000 or 100,000 acres, that's changing in one 24 hour period. 

Sarah: Great. So a specific part of this project, like we talked, you know, all these management partners that you work with was to work specifically with partners to develop models to better design prescribed fire treatments and reduce the risk of extreme fire spread.

And so I'm wondering if you could describe or talk about your management partners and how you actually collaborated on this work together.

Camille: Yeah. So one of our primary partners was with the Rocky Mountain Research Station, who, you know, engage managers on lots of different levels as well. Right? They - they're the research branch of the Forest Service, and do a lot of outreach and engagement.

So that was one of our primary like coauthors and partners on this. And then the - specifically on the prescribed fires and thinking about extreme wildfires - this was in relation to some of the ongoing work that the Bureau of Land Management out of the Gunnison Field Office and the Gunnison National Forest were thinking about and working on, which is kind of a unique area to think about prescribed fires, primarily because we often do prescribed fires and kind of lower elevation ponderosa pine-dominated forests.

And this was an effort to do some prescribed fires in higher elevation forests, specifically to kind of promote aspen growth, especially post-beetle kill in kind of lodgepole and spruce fir forests. 

Sarah: Excellent. And so I'm curious, what kind of - did you have specific products that were developed for your partners, or what kind of things were they asking for?

Camille: Yeah, they had a lot of questions about what, you know, fire modeling we could produce for them. You know, what should they expect if they tried these kinds of treatments? Again, because they're pretty novel. And anytime you do a prescribed fire, there's still a risk of it getting out of control. And especially in new forest types or new conditions, there's concerns about if you should do it, or what conditions should you do them under.

So that was a lot of the questions. And and then I think if the goal is to promote Aspen, there was a lot of kind of questions thinking about after the prescribed fire happens, what is the -  did did they achieve it? And are we seeing more Aspen recovery? So thinking about some of that post-prescribed fire monitoring as well.

Sarah: And I know the project just ended. So you might not know this yet, but do you know if your manager partners have used the products yet or use the research in any way so far? 

Camille: Yeah, I mean, I think especially the kind of Aspen piece, and kind of - and quantifying that Aspen are actually successful barriers to extreme fire spread.

You know, I think that sometimes we have this intuitive knowledge amongst a certain community like firefighters that, you know, that these - this is true, but sometimes having this science in your back pocket to help you make those decisions and explain your decisions. And I have seen that happen with several different managers of like this is super helpful because I wanted to - I have done this in the past and people have pushed back against it, or I've, you know, wanted to build a line here and no one thought it was a good place to.

And this really helped, you know, solidify some of those decisions. So that's I think the place where I've seen the most, most use so far. I also think on the – are our treatments doing anything question – especially in these extreme conditions, I think that's always a great place to set a foundation for continuing to do forest management and restoration treatments because there's many reasons not to potentially, but this shows that on the whole, they're - they are doing something, and helping us to, you know, move that needle at least a little bit when we have these extreme events. And so I have heard from managers that that's again helpful for justifying some of their work. And, you know, able to be used in future management plans.

Sarah: Okay. Well, that's great to hear. I know sometimes when projects just end, it's - a lot of times we see the impact, you know, a little bit later. And so it's great that you're already seeing and hearing from your partners that the research has been useful so far. And, I assume that will only continue as they can use it more.

I want to shift gears just a little bit and think about field work. Because a lot of people, you know, we've had a lot of people on the podcast who shared some harrowing stories about, you know, what, what might have happened to them in the field. And so, and those are always fun to hear about.

Yeah. So I'm curious if you have any stories that you'd like to share from the field. 

Camille: Yeah. When I saw this question, I got excited and then I was like, oh man, there's such a list. What do I talk about? So maybe one of the ones that happened to me a few years ago, that I think kind of intersects well with this, topic and thinking about post-fire landscapes. I was doing some research on the Spring Creek Fire, which was in southern Colorado, and it interestingly burned kind of over this cone of a mountain.

So it went from grassland ecosystems all the way to alpine ecosystems and pretty steep gradient, you know, and I had a graduate student that was working on the project with me. And we were literally on the last day of fieldwork to go pick up soil moisture sensors and probes and, we're like, all right, we can bust this out, it's just going to be a few hours left in the field and we can call it good. It was the end of his master's fieldwork. And we were in two separate vehicles, and we're driving down the dirt road, which is the absolute quickest way to get from one part of the fire to another – that otherwise is like about an hour and a half plus drive around.

And we started to notice that the road had washed out many times already, two years post-fire, but was, you know, passable. But it had rained the night before. And so we just kind of keep going and keep going, and we're only about a mile and a half until you get to the highway again or like again, a 30-mile back down the dirt road to go back to just get to another paved road, to go around.

And we get to this one place that was very muddy, and I just gunned it in my Subaru, which is terrible if you've had - if you’ve had a Subaru in most poor road conditions. But I made it through, and my graduate student in his big truck got - he decided to go very slow through it, and just sank into it.

And then in our attempt to get it out, he ended up on three wheels on the edge of the road. And thankfully, you know, this is where a lot of people who live in more wild landscapes are really useful. Someone with a four-wheeler came driving along, laughed – had a hearty laugh at us – and then pulled the truck out of the mud.

And we turned around and did the hour and a half, two hour drive around to keep going to his sites. 

Sarah: But so after all of that, you still had to turn around and go the whole way back? 

Camille: Yeah. We did. Yeah. Yeah. It was not - thankfully, those people also told us that only about another mile up – so only half a mile from the highway – there were huge boulders in the road, so even if we'd made it through that, we wouldn't have made it any further. 

Sarah: Okay, well, that's good to know. That makes me feel better. That poor master's student.

Camille: Yeah. I took lots of embarrassing pictures of him, you know, to make sure that they were shown during his defense.

Sarah: Oh, yeah, I’m sure he appreciated that. Well, so, I mean, that was kind of exciting! Also challenging, but that, you know, in my next question – you work on a lot of different things. What is, what would you say is the most exciting part of your work? And, you know, flip side, what's the most challenging? 

Camille: Yeah, I think the most exciting part of my work is, well, I think the most rewarding is being outside.

I still love being outside, which is what got me into fire to begin with. I also really love engaging with people about things that excite me, which is ecology. And so, talking to managers, talking to students, all of that is really enjoyable to me. And I think the one of the most rewarding is definitely walking out on a treatment unit or in a post-fire landscape with a manager and seeing the landscape from their eyes, and also helping them see things that - that I notice on that landscape.

I think one of the most challenging is, I study post-fire landscapes a lot, and that's something that we all feel a sense of loss about. You know, if it's a place that you know and a place that you love, and it's really hard to see how many landscapes we have transformed with these large fires in the last 20 years. And kind of the rate at which our landscapes are changing is really, can be hard, even though I am a fire ecologist and see a lot of really cool things in post-fire landscapes, it can also be sad. 

And so I think that just, you know, facing the amount of change that we are, and seeing all the passionate people that really care about and want to do good for our ecosystems, that are trying to kind of work up against a, a ticking clock and, a system that is hard sometimes to work through is some of the most challenging.

Sarah: So it's interesting you bring up the sense of loss, because on our episode that aired at the beginning of March where we’re talking about snowpack, Mackenzie Skiles also brought up a sense of loss and grief over loss of snowpack, and the changing landscape associated with that. So it definitely not in a good way, seems to be a theme, that we're seeing lately.

And I do want to – that does not segue well to my next question – but hopefully, you know, we'll get on a more hopeful note, but we like to ask all of our participants, you know, where you do find hope, where you can. And so, yeah, what, what gives you hope? 

Camille: Oh, so many things. Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, while there is a sense of loss, I think one of my jobs, honestly, in my, in my position is to talk about all the cool things we see in post-fire landscapes.

And to me, that brings me, me so much hope when I'm out in a newly burned or even ten years post-fire landscape. And I see what is coming back because it's rarely a doom and gloom story, right? It may not be what we - what was there before, what we think should be there, but it is amazing to see the wildflowers that are so big and so happy.

If you are a fungi person, the amount of cool mushrooms, the amount of edible mushrooms, you know – I've annoyed many a crew member by either eating tons of berries in post-fire landscapes, or just like converting to hunting for morels for the day. Yeah, I think that post-fire landscapes really show us that, you know, fire is an important part of our ecosystems and a natural part, even if what we're experiencing every day is not necessarily normal or what we've experienced before.

But I think it shows that, you know, we often think about – I hate when newspapers have big red blobs about fires, right? Like showing where the fire burned, because then people have this perception that all of it is bad and destroyed and not good anymore. And I think the reality is that there is so many cool things happening on those landscapes as they recover and transform into new things.

And we can certainly do things and aid in that recovery. But to me, just watching them, what they look like from year to year is – brings me a lot of hope, as well as all the people. Right? What we want out of a landscape is inherently a person thing and a personal value. And there are so many people who care so deeply about our landscapes and really want to see them thrive into the future.

So that always brings me lots of hope. 

Sarah: Okay. Well, thank you for, for that answer, definitely made me hopeful. And it is a reminder with, you know, like you said earlier, that all landscapes are post-fire landscapes. So they come back – might not be what we're expecting – but they are resilient landscapes for sure. And so I'm just - to end today, if there was one thing that you'd like listeners to remember, what would it be? 

Camille: Yeah. I think that our landscapes grew up and adapted to fire, and fire is not something that happens to a landscape. It's something that is part of that landscape. And all of our forests need fire to a certain degree, and it's certain, certain types of fire.

And so I always try to emphasize that we are - well, we're not going into a future without fire. More fire is likely to happen, especially as we see climatic changes. We are, we do have the choice of how we manage that fire and the kind of fire that we see. And I really like the quote that, fire is a bad master, but a good servant, because it can do a lot for us and has for millennia as people have managed landscapes.

And we have kind of forgotten that over the last hundred and twenty years of managing these landscapes post-European colonization and the more we can use fire to be our servant, the more it can do good. But we can't do anything when we have these extreme days and these fires are, are overrunning anything that we've we could do on the land.

So that's what I would say. 

Sarah: Okay. Well, thank you again for joining me today and having this conversation about fire. Really appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you.

Emile: Thanks for listening to Come Rain or Shine. Podcast of the USGS southwest CASC, New Mexico State University and the University of Arizona. If you liked this podcast, don't forget to rate or review it and subscribe for more great episodes.

Sarah:  A special thanks to our production crew, Reanna Burnett and Lauren White. If you want more information or have any questions for the speakers or would like to offer feedback, please reach out to us via our website.