Review Comments1
Charles W. Philpot2
The quote I least agreed with was by one of the
Monday morning keynote speakers. He was talking
about management of Mediterranean systems. He
said that the science of their management was
virtually unknown. I really think what he meant
to say was that many management proposals for
Mediterranean systems have no scientific basis.
Point two that I'd like to mention deals with
the concern expressed all during the week about
the lack of social, political, and economic subjects in this symposium. That was pretty much by
design, because this was meant to be a technical
session, although it is not a classical symposium
in some senses. We tried to make up for that
lack, that we all agree is important, by having
some planning papers this morning dealing with two
issues. One is the planning process itself,
whether operational activity, program planning, or
whatever. That's how most of this technical
information is applied, if it is applied. And the
second thing, was to make it clear that there are
social, political, and economic considerations
that in many cases far outweigh the technical
information we tried to transfer this week. I
still believe, however, you can have all the
political support, economic support, etc., and if
you're doing things that are technically wrong you
are not going to make it in the long run. But in
any case, we were aware of that problem and we
tried to make up for that this morning with the
land use management planning session. I personally feel that the speakers did a very good job on
that issue.
The third thing I would like to talk about was
mentioned by Malcolm Gill and several others who
have been to the last two symposiums. I was also
at the 1973 symposium on Living with Chaparral,
which was sponsored by the Sierra Club, California
Department of Forestry, and the U.S. Forest Service. At that symposium, prescribed burning was
not mentioned by anybody. Now some of us tried to
mention it by using "sneaky" words, but generally
that was a no-no at that meeting. That wasn't too
many years ago.
1
Presented at the Symposium on Dynamics and
Management of Mediterranean-type Ecosystems, June
22-26, 1981, San Diego, California.
2
Assistant Director, Continuing Research for
Southern California and Hawaii, Pacific Southwest
Forest and Range Experiment Station, Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Riverside,
Calif.
Gen. Tech. Rep. PSW-58. Berkeley, CA: Pacific Southwest Forest and Range
Experiment Station, Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture; 1982.
In 1977, what Malcolm said was entirely true,
prescribed burning was mentioned by some speakers,
and occasionally in the audience, but you could
tell it was a highly controversial subject and one
on which we had a long way to go to gain support,
even in research agencies.
It's interesting to note that in 1981 at this
symposium, there were almost no papers that did
not mention prescribed burning either just to say
that we were considering doing it or that the
paper itself was about prescribed burning. I
consider that quite a change in just 8 or 9 years.
In fact, amazing in many respects because I
didn't think it would ever happen. But I tend to
be a cynic.
The other two things I noticed are that in 1977
we had a very hard time getting people to present
papers on soil nutrients in Mediterranean systems
and wildlife in Mediterranean systems. In this
symposium, we had an overabundance of nutrient
papers. We had to turn a lot of nutrient papers
down. We still, although we had adequate papers
on wildlife, do not have adequate research in
Mediterranean systems on nongame species. That's
another area we have to address. Maybe at the
next symposium we'll have a lot of papers about
nongame species. You can get all the papers you
want on deer and moo cows!
My fourth point, and Bob Callaham did mention
it also, is that it's very difficult to transfer
information to managers at an International Symposium, because historically they are designed to
transfer information among scientists and not to
practitioners. Therefore, you have to deal with
two things. One is the format of the symposium
and the participants, and the second is the format
of the presentations. It's very difficult to get
researchers to write papers and talk about their
research in terms of management needs or management implications, or even to make statements at
the end about what this means to management. We
did have some good examples of researchers that
did this: Tim Paysen, Lisle Green, Paul Zinke, and
Sid Shea. I'm not just singling them out, but
their papers are examples of the kinds of papers
that we can present that clearly explain management implications.
I'd also like to say that in my opinion the
practitioner papers at the symposium which are
normally not included in international symposiums
are, for the most part, outstanding. I think it
would have been a good move on our part to have a
workshop format for some of the afternoon sessions
and have some afternoons totally free. We argue
about this every time we put a symposium together.
Someday some of us will win on that point.
Bob Callaham also mentioned that we're going to
try and rewrite the proceedings into a short 50 or
60 page synthesis document for managers. I think
we can do that. At this point, the proceedings
would be about 700 pages, which would be a little
tough to handle in the field.
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The next point I'd like to make is the point
that many of us have tried to make for several
years. It has to do with the difference between
prescribed burning, prescribed fires, and wild–
fire. There isn't any difference between pre–
scribed fire and wildfire in the fire behavior and
fire effects sense. Prescribed burning and wild–
fire are political terms, policy terms, and legal
terms. They're not fire behavior terms or fire
effects terms. The reason I point this out is
that there's a lot of fire effects information
available that has come off wildfires and people
tend to ignore it because it came off wildfires.
It can be a very serious problem. There is no
difference. Fires that spread the same way, have
the same intensity, and burn the same terrain and
the same fuel types--they're the same fire, pre–
scribed or not. This leads to another problem we
have, especially in research. We still have a lot
of research going on in fire effects, where the
fire itself is not documented. People are presenting information to managers from high intensity
fires, low intensity fires, and medium intensity
fires and managers have difficulty using it,
because somebody assigns high intensity to a fire
in one watershed and a mile away the same fire
behavior may be somebody else's low intensity
fire. A lot of fire effects information, in fact
about 95 percent of it nationwide, is almost
useless from a standpoint of implementation
because it cannot be related to fire behavior
characteristics which is how managers are writing
prescriptions. They don't know how to predict
effects because they don't know what the
researcher meant when he said "low intensity." So
I hope we can get that in better shape in the next
few years.
Another problem or concern I have with pre–
scribed burning, especially in Mediterranean
ecosystems, is there are people talking, at least
I perceive that they are talking, about massive,
broad–scale approaches to prescribed burning. I
think they need to look at some of the work Tim
Paysen has done and some of the comments Jeanine
Derby made this morning indicating that there is
quite a mosaic of conditions and sites out there.
There are very different fire needs and very
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short spatial changes. We have the ability now to
write prescriptions and talk about fire effects on
a much more refined scale than just taking a
flying drip torch out, touching off 20,000 acres
every afternoon because we want to manage fuels,
type convert, or whatever. If you're going to
talk about vegetation management, I think you
ought to get serious about it and get a little bit
back from those kinds of approaches.
One more thing and it's just a suggestion for
the future. I started adding up the number of
acres of prescribed fire officially planned for
southern California for chaparral management
(including the Los Padres National Forest). I
came up with something like 150,000 to 200,000
acres a year. We don't have the resources on a
forest or a district, or a California Department
of Forestry region, or a County to go into that
kind of a prescribed burning program in southern
California, because of limitations of people,
money, air space, and windows--prescription windows. I think the prescribed burning people and
the fire people and the practitioners in this
room, and other places, need to get together and
give prescribed burning the same emphasis they're
giving suppression through things like FIRESCOPE
and the Operations Coordination Center.
There are tools, organizations, contracts,
agreements, and all kinds of things available for
coordination and sharing of resources. These
ought to be converted and modified so they could
be used for prescribed burning. One place in the
world where this approach is very successful is
Western Australia, where prescribed burning is
planned about 2 years ahead. The windows are
allocated down to the forest level, resources are
allocated down to the forest level, and everybody
isn't going out on the same day and burning 18,000
acres of their ground. It may look like that
sometimes in the movies, but that's not how they
do it. We have that same problem in southern
California. I just can't imagine the prescribed
burning that we need, and are planning, and are
committed to now, going on much longer at the
district or small organizational level.