How Fire Could Change the Face of the West

The fire debt is finally coming due.

By 2050, predicted the researchers, much of Yellowstone’s forest could be gone.

The vast wildfires of this summer and last represent a new normal for the western United States. They may signal a radical landscape transformation, one that will make the 21st century West an ecological frontier.

Unlike fires that have occurred regularly for thousands of years, these fires are so big and so intense as to create discontinuities in natural cycles. In the aftermath, existing forests may not return. New ecosystems will take their place.

"These transitions could be massive. They represent the convergence of several different forces," said Donald Falk, a fire ecologist at the University of Arizona. "There is a tremendous amount of energy on the landscape that historically would not have been there. These are nuclear amounts of energy."

By Brandon Keim

Full Story: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/07/western-fire-transformation/