Following a year of prolonged drought in Western North Carolina, with the sudden spark of wildfires throughout much of the mountain region, the one question on everyone's minds has been: 'when will they be extinguished?'. But for students and faculty at Western Carolina University's Natural Resources Department, the wildfires proved to be strangely fortunate.
"It is a unique opportunity. Certainly no one expected that we would have fires, this many fires, or this intensity of burning in this area." That's Peter Bates, Professor of Geosciences and Natural Resources and Conservation at Western, and he intends to use the burn sites from this fall's wildfires as areas of study for his students in the spring. Students taking courses in his department want to be firefighters, forest rangers, wildlife management and land conservationists. Bates sat down with WCQS to discuss this very topic.
Why study at a burn site?
“We’re surrounded by natural resources that are stressed by a number of factors; land development, climate change, pollution, all those kinds of things, so resources that are very important to the local economy, very important to the local way of life, so there are a lot of opportunitities for our students to understands how to protect and preserve those resources.” (0:30)
What is your take on these fires?
“My take on the fires is that they’re extremely unusual. Certainly in our recent past, we haven’t had wildfires of this magnitude—in this part of the country. That just creates an opportunity for our students. In recent years, we’ve become much more cognizant, much more aware of the important role that fire played in eastern forests. Several decades ago, people really thought that fire was really a natural force in forests that were out west. We really didn’t appreciate how important fire was to our forest ecosystems in the east. But in past couple of decades we’ve really started to recognize that. So there’s a lot of interest in using fire as a management tool which is really different from what is happening right now. Leaves, wood, vegetation and trees like Rhododendron and Mountain Laurel is very flammable once started.
What kinds of things would students be studying from these wildfire sites?
“A lot of different things. We have faculty in our department that are very interested in looking at these fires to see what the impacts are. My interest is primarily in the forest community itself. These fires will kill some trees kill some understory vegetation, create more sunlight. Im interested in seeing how the forest will respond to that. What species will come in, will the same things come back. Will we shift the species composition? We have other faculty that are very interested to see what the effects of these fires on wildlife habitat. Wildlife are very responsive to changes in our forest structure. I anticipate that we’ll have very different changes in forest structure. What will that do to the bird community? The mammal community and soforth. We have other faculty interested in water quality, and soil properties. Fies of this intensity will create a lot of ash. Thry might burn all the way down to the soil, which might increase the chances of erosion, sedimentation in our streams, chemistry a little bit which might change our water quality. So that’s something we might be looking at. Another area that we’re very interested in is the remote sensing aspect—there’s been great strides in our remote sensing technologies—being able to view the earth from satellites from airplanes. How can we improve our mapping of these fires? It’s a very rugged landscape, a very big landscape, so remote sensing give us an opportunity to look at the whole landscape scale, the big picture, to see what’s going on, as opposed to field-based research.”
Students know what to expect?
“This is our capstone class, so first off we have not really finalized this as a project were going to be working on. We’ve been in preliminary discussions with the U.S. Forest Service about this. As you can imagine right now they’re very busy with other things. Where they have an expressed interest in looking at this next spring, right now they haven’t been able to devote that much time to what that might mean. But assuming it does work, as a capstone class, it’s basically an opportunity where what we expect is the students will come in and design the class itself. This is a real world problem related to natural resources. It’s up to them to define the parameters of that problem which is important to determine the data which they might need to reflect what the final product might be. It’s not a situation where we just lay it all out for them and have them do it, per se. We do that in other classes, but not with this one.”
In what ways will the region benefit from this class?
“This will benefit the region in several ways. Most of our students in our program are local students They’re from this part of the state. So they’ll be educated in resource conservation and management issues. I think the region relies very heavily on our natural environment that surrounds us—the forest, and the condition of that forest. I think the region will benefit greatly from developing an understanding of the impacts of these fires, how that forest might develop after the fires, and whether or not there are things we might be able to do to influence how it develops to better preserve and protect that forest in the future.”
Is this a rare opportunity?
"As a program we’ve worked with the forest service and the parks service, and the NC Wildife Resources Commission, in terms of monitoring their prescribed fire activities for the last decade. We have a close association with these agencies. We’ve spent a lot of time looking at the effects of fire in forest systems in this region.”
Bates says that if approved, the capstone class could likely go into the Dick’s Creek wildfire burn site of northern Jackson County—an area with a burn site of about 730 acres—and could kick off as early as March.