B4
THE ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 2021
Vegetation
regrowth in the
B&B Complex
burned area
between
Mount
Jeff erson
and Mount
Washington.
Anne Nolin/
University of
Nevada, Reno
Shop locally online
Kelly Gleason/Oregon State University
Researchers found that snow cover is a key driver of revegetation in heavily burned areas of
the Cascades.
Wildfi re recovery depends on
Cascade snowpack, study says
By BRADLEY W. PARKS
Oregon Public Broadcasting
Blankets of white play a big part in restor-
ing carpets of green after wildfi re, according
to a new study.
Researchers with Oregon State University
and the University of Nevada, Reno found
that snow cover is among the most critical
elements to revegetating heavily burned areas
of the Oregon and Washington Cascades.
“We’re in this period of climate change
now where we know we have declining
snowpacks, and that creates more mois-
ture-stressed forests, and that leads to bigger
fi res, more severe fi res,” said Anne Nolin, a
snow hydrologist and professor at the Univer-
sity of Nevada, Reno who led the study. “And
after fi re, now we know that snow matters.”
Revegetation is important to post-fi re
recovery, as plants help stabilize soil, pro-
vide forage and habitat, sequester carbon and
improve water quality.
The researchers wanted to determine the
key variables driving revegetation in severely
burned zones across four distinct mountain
regions: the Oregon and Washington Cas-
cades, and the Northern Rockies of Montana
and Idaho.
They used satellite data from NASA to
read the “greenness” of summer vegetation
in these areas, snow cover and precipita-
tion. (Greenness, Nolin said, is a measure of
plants’ photosynthetic activity, not how green
it looks to the naked eye.) The study relied
on data from two years leading up to a major
wildfi re and four years following.
The analysis found, to little surprise, that
summer rainfall was the most critical fac-
tor in revegetation across each region. More
surprising, Nolin said, was that snow cover
proved particularly important to vegetation
rebounds in the Cascades.
Snowpack is like a frozen, above-ground
reservoir. Drier parts of Oregon and Wash-
ington are heavily dependent on winter snow-
pack that melts slowly and evenly throughout
the spring and summer.
Cascadian plants are, too.
“(The) growing season really apparently
does depend very strongly on snow,” Nolin
said, “and especially at those elevations
where we used to have pretty regular snow
cover, but now that snow cover has been
declining because of warming winters.”
The study did not account for what type
of vegetation grew back and only focused on
severely burned areas.
But Nolin said the research underscores
the importance of Cascade snowpack, which
is increasingly threatened by climate change.
The region has endured a steady decline in
annual snowpack and could soon experi-
ence winters with little to no snow if humans
are unable to curb greenhouse gas emis-
sions from burning fossil fuels like coal and
petroleum.
“In order to preserve those legacies of
snow for future generations, we have to really
act now,” said Nolin, also a longtime skier.
The study was published in the Journal of
Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences.
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