🔥Welcome to Burning Questions🔥
An occasional newsletter at the intersection of wildfires, science, and journalism in the West
Welcome to Burning Questions: an occasional newsletter at the intersection of wildfires, climate science, and research in the West. It’s the latest student-produced newsletter coming out of the Colorado College Journalism Institute.
Today and in the future, we’ll seek to showcase what you need to know about the most pressing wildfire news in Colorado, while offering insight on a burgeoning climate research project led by an interdisciplinary team of Colorado scientists featuring CC Associate Professor of Environmental Studies Rebecca Barnes, and others.
Burning Questions will be a multi-part series. We hope to become your occasional one-stop-shop for making sense of wildfire news and research in the Rockies.
In an attempt to bridge a gap between journalism and science as part of this work, we plan to track developments of a recent research grant from the National Science Foundation for work by a team of five scientists on a project titled “Role of Soil Microbiome Resilience in Ecosystem Recovery Following Severe Wildfire.” (A mouthful, we know. In a future edition, we aim to break down that title and explain what each part of it means.)
📝 So, who’s writing this, and who are we?
We’re two senior journalism minors at Colorado College, Riley Prillwitz and Leah Thayer, who share an interest in climate science, and this newsletter is part of our journalism practicum.
Prillwitz is a film and media studies major who writes for The Catalyst student newspaper. In addition to focusing on climate change in journalism classes at CC, she also originally reported on Barnes’ research grant in September. She is interested in continuing to report on this kind of research and connecting it to current wildfire news in our region.
Thayer is majoring in organismal biology and ecology and she hopes her writing for this newsletter will help connect her major and minor to convey technical scientific research through journalism. Specifically through this newsletter, Thayer hopes to shed light on the NSF project team’s research and share how this and other wildfire research like it is important to the citizens of Colorado and across the West.
So, let’s get to it.
👩🏻🔬 The Researchers
A key attribute of the NSF-funded wildfire project grant is its interdisciplinary nature as it gathers expertise from a diverse pool of scientists from around the country. Now, let’s introduce you to the team.
As we mentioned earlier, one of the lead principal investigators (PI) on the project is Barnes, a biogeochemist focused on carbon processes within soils.
The second lead PI is Mike Wilkins, a microbiologist and associate professor of soil and crop sciences at Colorado State University. Wilkins specializes in DNA and RNA sequencing, and is interested in how severe fires impact microbial communities (tiny villages of microorganisms, like bacteria and fungi.)
Thomas Borch is also a professor in the soil and crop sciences department at CSU. He is primarily interested in using mass spectrometry — basically fancy science language for what kind of carbon is in this? — to investigate carbon make-up within soils.
Then there’s Sydney Glassman, a fungal ecologist and assistant professor of microbiology and plant pathology at the University of California Riverside, whose role in the project stems (pun intended) from understanding how fungi in burned soil help pine seedlings recolonize soil after fire.
Lastly, Charles “Chuck” Rhoades is an ecosystem scientist at the U.S Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station in Fort Collins, Colorado, who will be overseeing sampling, experimental design, and soil chemistry analysis for the research project.
These scientists have come together with the primary goal of understanding the importance of soil microbes in forest recovery following severe wildfire, which they’ll accomplish by studying chronosequences of burn pile scars under different experimental conditions.
*Queue tape rewind sound effect*
We know … there are some tongue-twisters in there, so let’s break this down a little: Essentially, a chronosequence is a set of ecosystems similar in vegetation, topography, and climate, but differing in age and time period. Wilkins describes chronosequencing as a way to “replace space for time,” meaning in this case using recorded samples across different areas within a forest that were burned at different times.
Their samples will come from burn pile scars, which are exactly what they sound like; piles of fuel, mainly dead wood and leaf litter, collected in piles to be burned under controlled conditions as a method of fire mitigation by forest management. These piles leave a physical and chemical mark, or scar, in the soil after burning; this is what the team will be studying.
Using these burn piles, Wilkins says, allows the team to analyze how the soil chemistry and microbiology are changing with each decade of potential recovery time since they were burned. Traditionally in chronosequencing research, researchers pull data from areas far and wide where ecosystems might differ on multiple levels, like forest type, elevation, and fuel type.
But using these specific burn piles in Colorado, Wilkins says, will give the researchers a “unique opportunity to actually have an effective chronosequence without all these confounding variables.”
🌲 So where is this magical place?🌲
The lodgepole pine forests of North Park, Colorado, a rural area just north of the town of Walden near the Wyoming border. In addition to being the “moose viewing capital of Colorado,” it’s here where these burn piles exist and will be the setting for the team’s research.
🔬What do these scientists hope to find?
Ultimately, the group hopes to discover how severe wildfires affect the microbes in the soils of the forests where they burn, and how long it takes for those soils to return to a pre-fire state.
Moreover, they hope to find out how fire-affected microbes in turn affect tree growth in those areas. The team expects the project to span a three-year period.
That will include active research, student involvement, and post-research work. They officially started a few months ago, and have already collected preliminary data like sampling soils from the burn piles, soil incubation experiments, and doing DNA sequencing of microbial communities within them.
Some questions they hope to answer:
How quickly does a forest become carbon neutral after a wildfire?
How do microbes influence the reestablishment of trees?
Do the right microbes still exist in these forests?
To what extent does a fire change soil chemistry?
❓Why does all this matter, anyway?
The researchers believe this project has significant implications across the board, for Colorado, for the Colorado College community, and for science.
Conclusions from it could have meaning for anyone affected by wildfires, which at this point is just about every Coloradan, in one way or another. The experts explain this by referencing two of our state’s most valuable resources: outdoor recreation and water.
The research could also help inform land management strategies after fires.
The researchers say effects from wildfires on the water cycle can’t be understated. Severe fires alter the hydraulic cycle in many ways, including in the level of snow pack, timing of snow melt, and water quality. We need water to live, and if you care about that, the researchers say, you should care about wildfire research in Colorado.
The project also has far-reaching connections to the greater issue of climate science, Barnes says. Particularly, through a goal of exploring ecosystem feedbacks intrinsic with wildfires, the research could help determine how much carbon landscapes scorched by fire can store in the future.
Meanwhile, carbon sequestration — the process of storing atmospheric carbon dioxide — is a key mechanism affecting global climate change.
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, terrestrial landscapes, like forests, store almost 20% of the CO₂ emitted by humans every year. This research allows scientists to better answer questions like, as Barnes puts it, “as the climate continues to warm and dry, what does that mean for our landscape in terms of a sink of carbon?” With a goal of filling that knowledge gap, this project seeks to provide value to the crucial science-based climate solutions of our time.
A collaboration between research for this project and the Journalism Institute at CC is something that sets it apart from other scientific designs. Explaining research results is “a critical part of a scientist’s work,” Wilkins says. “It doesn't matter if we do great science if no one ever hears about it. It’s … this sort of tree falling in the empty woods kind of stuff.”
So that’s where we come in. The Burning Questions team, standing in the theoretical woods waiting for trees to fall so we can make sure you hear them.
The research team, and us too, have hopes that our occasional newsletter will help communicate this research to audiences that might not typically read about this kind of stuff, and that it can help build public interest in wildfire research and climate science as a whole.
💥Wildfire wire
One thing we also hope to offer in each future installment this newsletter is a roundup of recent reporting and research we’ve read about wildfires in the West. (You can email us tips and suggestions at burningquestionscc@gmail.com.) So here goes:
🔥 As we hit publish on this inaugural edition, a fast-growing wildfire was burning near Estes Park, Colorado, threatening structures and prompting evacuations. “The Rockies are more likely to see snow than wildfires at this time of year, but here we are,” reported one outlet. The local Estes Park newspaper, near Rocky Mountain National park, has updates.
Update: “A single-engine air tanker crashed Tuesday night while responding to a wildfire burning just south of Estes Park,” The Colorado Sun reported. “The pilot and sole occupant of the plane was killed.” One prominent Colorado radio host said: “After reports of a firefighting plane down tonight, I’m forced to reckon with my understanding of climate-related loss. It doesn’t just include victims of heatwaves and hurricanes.”
❗️You might have already heard about Colorado Public Radio’s blockbuster investigation into wildfires in our state, but if you haven’t yet, check it out here. We don’t want to give it all away, but the investigation breaks down how most of Colorado’s human-sparked wildfires have unknown causes. Some revelations include how “Colorado is the only state in the U.S. without a state fire marshal,” and how compared to California’s 80 full-time fire investigators, Colorado only has six. CPR also reveals how the state’s limited fire investigation funding and resources. (CPR published a subsequent piece explaining how the journalists analyzed Colorado wildfire data.)
🗳 On Nov. 2, voters in El Paso County “approved a measure … that will allow the city to retain up to $20 million in taxes to mitigate wildfire risk in and around town,” according to The Gazette. The vote is in an indication that officials recognize the higher risks of wildfire in Colorado’s second-largest city and surrounding county and voters are willing to forgo some of their TABOR refunds to pay for wildfire mitigation such as “thinning vegetation in city open spaces near homes.”
📜 Colorado “will receive billions of dollars in the recently passed federal infrastructure investment bill, including money for both traditional infrastructure projects and ones aimed at increasing resiliency in the face of more frequent and more intense extreme weather due to climate change,” Colorado Newsline reported.
🌲 The 2020 wildfires might have changed Colorado forests for a long time. Denver’s KUSA 9News reported on research showing wildfires in Colorado are burning faster and hotter, thanks to climate change. The intensity could cause burn scars to become larger while slowing the regrowth process. What this means for Coloradans is that areas affected by wildfire may not regrow and appear as they did before for another 20 to 50 years.
💻 Multiple Colorado news outlets have reported recently about various tech startups that have committed to improving technology for detecting and fighting wildfires. One company in particular, Pano, aims to reduce the time between the start of a fire and the response to fight it. Morning Brew reports these companies will use “emerging tech like AI, machine learning, drones, and sensors [that] can help firefighters do more with less, or with the same.”
🐐 Firefighting goats to the rescue? It started out as a slew of news stories in early October, describing how people could deploy goats near Carbondale, Colorado to eat existing brush that fuels wildfires. The U.S Bureau of Land Management hired Lani Malmberg and her herd of animals to get the job done. “Goats bypass the grasses cattle and horses primarily eat, preferring the noxious plants that serve as kindling to wildfires,” People magazine reported. “This trait makes the critters perfect weed eaters in the battle to clear out brush that has fueled the recent epic wildfires in the western United States.”
🎥 CBS4 Denver reporter and CSU graduate Dillon Thomas beat us at our own game! He created a short documentary, aired on CBS4, about the Cameron Peak fire and the repercussions of the natural disaster a year later. Thomas also did a Q&A session with Colorado State about the documentary, which you should check out as well.
🧑🏻🚒 Last week, The New Yorker published an in-depth story highlighting the dangers of fighting fires today, as it is becoming more common for them to grow into megafires. Editor Michael Luo tweeted about the story, saying, “Putting out too many fires contributes to the creation of even bigger blazes: fire ecologists call this the ‘fire paradox.’ Today’s wildland firefighters are trapped within it.”
Burning Questions is created by Colorado College students Riley Prillwitz and Leah Thayer as part of their journalism practicum. The project seeks to help bridge a gap between wildfire science research and journalism. 📬 Enter your email address to subscribe and get the newsletter in your inbox each time it comes out. You can reach us with questions, feedback, or tips by emailing burningquestionscc@gmail.com