What does a piñon pine and juniper forest look like after a fire? This month, SUWA staff and partners were out in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument following the Deer Springs Fire (which burned across an 11,000-acre area at the end of July). As you can see, while there are areas that burned long and hot, and where regrowth and regeneration will take more time, we were also encouraged to see new life starting to return almost immediately after the fire stopped burning — lupine, gambel oak, scurfpea, globemallow, rabbitbrush, sand dropseed, and many other native grasses, forbs, and shrubs!

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is accepting comments on its restoration proposal through Wednesday, August 28th.
Please write a comment in support of the agency’s important conservation-focused restoration efforts!

Prior to the fire, much of this area was a thick, healthy piñon-juniper forest. Although wildland fire can be a scary and intense occurrence on the landscape, it is a natural part of most ecosystems in the west, including piñon-juniper woodlands. Fire intervals, or how often a fire naturally occurs, are usually quite long for piñon-juniper forests on the Colorado Plateau: between 200 and 400 years. This area was no different, and when a fire did happen, it went big in many places where it burned. 

Fires can provide interesting insights into how certain natural conditions make areas more resilient to a warming climate and unnatural disturbances like invasive species that can alter natural fire behavior. For example, in the Deer Springs area, several stands of old-growth piñon and juniper trees visibly burned much more intermittently than surrounding areas, with some individual trees burning completely to ash while their neighboring trees only feet away remained completely unscathed.

After a wildland fire, there is a limited timeframe for the land management agency to request funding and assistance with immediate post-fire stabilization and restoration. Here, the BLM  (which manages the national monument) has proposed an emergency stabilization and rehabilitation project for the burn area that is currently open for a short, 7-day public comment period.

The BLM’s proposal includes many good and science-backed features, including aerially seeding the entire burn area with native seed appropriate to the local ecosystem, leaving all living piñon and juniper trees in the patchy areas that survived the fire as well as the intact understory plants and biological soil crust within these living stands, as well as leaving some large burned areas untouched by machinery (chaining, mastication) and planning for fencing exclosures to study the effectiveness of certain restoration practices and impacts of future disturbances on plant regeneration. We are extremely excited to see these important (and, in a National Monument, critical) design features as part of the BLM’s restoration and emergency stabilization plans. 

The BLM is showing their desire to protect Grand Staircase and its native ecosystems and uplifting the important role that science and research play on the Monument. Along with advocating for the agency to do even better, it is important that we show support for these good decisions so far in public comments, because there are private entities and other groups who are undoubtedly advocating for the use of non-native plant species and heavy-handed surface disturbance across the burn area because of potential value to domestic livestock. 

Please take a moment to write a comment in support of the BLM’s important conservation-focused restoration efforts, and encourage the agency to further prioritize restoration practices that favor natural ecosystem regeneration wherever possible in their plans for the Deer Springs area. This will enhance, rather than work against, the natural processes of regrowth by native species that are already happening out on the ground, protect important biological soil crusts, and prevent invasion by disturbance-loving invasive species like cheatgrass. Comments can also be submitted directly via the BLM’s ePlanning page.

Thank you!