While extensive forest clearing operations were previously conducted in the forested areas up to Sky Tavern and Mount Rose to make them less fire prone, not all forest experts agree with this strategy, with some of them saying it could make the situation worse.
In the wake of the Davis fire, several of them spoke to Our Town Reno, anonymously for fear of retribution since they work in forestry related industries.
A tax-funded practice they disagree with, which is practiced locally and in other regions of the U.S., is called forest mastication.
It’s basically a mechanical process involving cutting, grinding, or shredding forest vegetation to reduce its size. It's also known as forestry mulching, slash-busting or brush-cutting.
Different types of machines grind and shred vegetation into mulch, as a cost-effective way to clear land. Most trees are left standing while lots of the natural vegetation is removed.
But substantial research indicates that these strategies often lead to the replacement of vegetation by invasive species, such as cheatgrass.
Cheatgrass can group to a million sprouts per cubic meter as opposed to native grasses which are in the thousands.
This cheatgrass takes up a lot of the water, and creates potentially more flammability than what it replaced.
Goats which are brought into our forested areas can also eat the natural vegetation, rather than just the cheatgrass, also adding to the problem.
There was a recent wildfire conference in Reno with utility companies, fire department representatives and local officials heralding the use of goats to remove vegetation and to create fuel breaks for fires, but what if they were wrong in their intended assumptions?
Just several months after a celebrated visit, one ecology expert said it was “a sea of cheatgrass,” which they said can smolder for longer periods than what was previously there. They said this short-term type of forestry management can have opposite effects of the desired intent.
Cheatgrass, which was native to Eurasia, and first appeared in North America in the 19th century has been spreading ever since. Medusahead which also grows in our region as an invasive species is another danger.
The climate in Nevada is conducive to both, as these species start growing early in the Spring, sucking nutrients out of the soil to the detriment of less flammable flowers, native grasses, sagebrush, rabbitbrush and bluebunch wheatgrass.
“Once you have it, it’s very, very hard for anything else to grow. So you get this monoculture,” Elizabeth Leger, a professor and plant biologist at the University of Nevada, Reno was quoted as saying in a Nevada Current article about cheatgrass. “It just becomes this unbelievably flammable, super-connected, fine fuel,” she said of the late summer period we are in.
After a wildfire like the one we are enduring, it’s also cheatgrass that grows back faster, making it more and more difficult every time there’s a major fire for native species to regrow.
It seems like it’s the cheatgrass that should be selectively taken out when managing our local mountain forests rather than wholesale forest mastication.