Pining for a Blaze
The towering red pines so prevalent in Minnesota's Boundary Waters are at risk, researchers say. The culprit is fire — not the presence of it, but the lack of it.
Fires swept through the area every fifty to one hundred years before settlers came in during the early 1900s. Now they are fought and extinguished, but that may signal the demise of the red pine. Fires reduce most vegetation to ash, but they also enable surviving red pines to reproduce. Without those periodic blazes, researchers say, the area's abundant groves could eventually vanish.
"Because of fire suppression, we're starting to lose them forever," says Robert Scheller MS'00, a forest ecologist who, along with professor David Mladenoff '73, MS'74, PhD'85, is using computer models to study how fire might help save the forest.
Many of the species, which live about three hundred years, are nearing the end of their lives, and few new trees are rooting up to replace them. "If full fire suppression continues," Scheller says, "the forest may never recover, and red pine may be lost as a locally dominant species."
— Emily Carlson