Snags and grass regrowth after 1988 fires near Elk Creek, Yellowstone National Park. Photo: George Wuerthner.

A recent CNN article titled “Why even resilient forests are struggling to regrow after wildfires” paints a picture of how wildfires are “destroying” our forests and lacks perspective and context.

Like much of the information in the media, the article is full ofhyperbole and a failure to understand forest and wildfire ecology, though it does articulate some good concepts here and there. The language is full of pejorative terms: “a desolate clearing,” “charred soil,” “massive destruction,” “forests are being obliterated,” and so forth.

One of the main problems with the article’s starting assumptions is that forest conditions and vegetation cover are static. It assumes that after a major disturbance, vegetation will “recover” to its former condition. However, because climate controls vegetation over time, a changing climate will inevitably lead to significant changes in plant communities.

The article begins with a photo of a blackened landscape in Yellowstone and describes botanist Monica Turner in 2017 trekking across the charred remains of the 2016 Maple Fire. The author notes that only 5% of the area had seedlings.

Apparently, the author is unaware of several complicated factors that influence tree seedling survival. First, tree establishment is often episodic and, in the Rockies, largely dependent on moisture.

You may not see immediate tree regeneration because successful seedling survival depends on a variety of factors, such as moisture timing, temperature, and even the abundance of seed sources. The fact that a year after the Maple Fire, there was little apparent regeneration is not that unusual.

The second fact the author ignored, or did not know, is that the Maple Fire burned through a portion of the 1988 Yellowstone fires burn area.

Why is this an important factor? Because tree regeneration after the 1988 blazes consisted of small, dense stands of lodgepole pine. Lodgepole pine’s susceptibility to wildfire changes as it matures. When the trees are young and crowded, they tend to burn at high severity, much like plantation forests grown after timber cutting.

One study of California wildfires found that the odds of high-severity fire occurrence were 1.45 times higher on private industrial land than in publicly owned forests because of the high density of recently replanted clearcuts.