More wildfires will transform Yellowstone

AFP describes some fiery predictions for an iconic US national park: Climate change is likely to cause more frequent wildfires and may transform the forests and ecosystem of the iconic Yellowstone national park in the coming decades, a US study said Monday. Dense forests dominated by narrow lodgepole pines trees are currently a dominant feature of the picturesque tourist destination which straddles Idaho, Montana and Wyoming.

But more open spaces, grasslands and forests populated by different kinds of fir trees and shrubs could characterize it in the future, said the study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Years when no wildfires break out will become rare by 2050, and fires like the historic one in 1988 that ravaged 1,200 square miles (311,000 hectares), affecting more than one third of the park, will become the norm by 2075.

US university researchers made the forecasts by examining climate data from 1972 to 1999 and creating statistical patterns by combining those data with figures on the size and frequency of Rocky Mountain fires in the same period.

The study authors then projected how climate change of up to one degree Celsius annually, combined with the snowmelt which is arriving earlier each spring, would affect fires in Yellowstone through 2099.
"What surprised us about our results was the speed and scale of the projected changes in fire in Greater Yellowstone," said professor Anthony Westerling of the University of California, Merced.

"We expected fire to increase with increased temperatures, but we did not expect it to increase so much or so quickly. We were also surprised by how consistent the changes were across different climate projections."...

A bison crosses the road between two fire engines during 1988 Yellowstone fire, image taken by Jeff Henry, 1988 and retrieved from the following page [1] of the Yellowstone Digital Slide Files archives which are all in the public domain [2]