 Welcome to another seminar series from the Blue Mountain Natural Resources Institute. I'm the Institute Manager, Larry Hartman. The Blue Mountains Natural Resources Institute is a part of the Pacific Northwest Station of Forest Service Research and is also funded by the Pacific Northwest Region of the National Forest System. Our territory includes all of the Blue Mountains, including 10 counties in Oregon and 4 counties in Washington. The Institute achieves its success by working with its partners, which include federal, state, tribal, and local government agencies, as well as industry, environmental organization, private landowners, and educational institutions. The Institute does three main types of activities. First, we offer educational activities and technology transfer, including seminars like this one. And we do research management tours, publications, videos, and we even sponsor conferences. Second, we conduct applied research, which is designed to meet real-world resource management problems. Third, the Institute serves as a neutral forum for discussing environmental issues so that people or organizations with differing opinions can get to understand one another better. This presentation exemplifies the Institute's goal of putting science to work. It's part of our ongoing commitment to bring science results to resource managers and to the general public. This seminar series is entitled Fire Ecology and Management in the Blue Mountains, which explores the role and function of fire in the ecosystem. The second of the five sessions looks at two subjects, the effects of fire on amphibians and reptiles and soil and cambium temperatures associated with prescribed burning. I hope you enjoy it. I've been working and prescribed by our research since 1964. And the first part of my research involves the southeastern part of the United States, which Henry will tell you a whole lot more about. And then I moved to Arizona and we picked up a lot of research with regard to ponderosa pine. And I'm glad that I'm able to talk to you about the ponderosa pine because I think a lot of eastern Oregon has similar situations as we do there in Arizona. Arizona and New Mexico together have the most extensive ponderosa pine forest in the world. And it stretches from Williams, Arizona all the way over into New Mexico. And so the expanse of ponderosa pine and the nature of its ecology is all involved are on fire. And I'd like to get started with my slides. Oh, I gotta put in a plug for the company. The Fire Lab at Riverside, California is close to 30 years old now and it is the third of the Fire Labs in the United States. Macon, Georgia was the first one. And then Missoula, Montana and then finally Riverside, California. And a lot of the research at Riverside is no longer fire research. There are other projects there now, part of the Pacific Southwest Station, but a lot of fire research still goes on there. I was moved to Riverside from Flagstaff where most of our research was going on and still do a lot of research there. The ponderosa pine, like I told you, stretches over most of Arizona and into New Mexico and is, like I said, the most extensive ponderosa pine forest in the world. And it grows basically as pure stands, but the stands are not as a lot of forest stands are. The pre-settlement times, ponderosa pine grew more or less as a savanna, that it was basically a grass culture with scattered trees. And today it's a totally different form. After the grazing and lumbering that took place at the turn of the century and the fire suppression that took place after that has transformed ponderosa pine into what we see today, which is basically a continuous stand and it has two different, well, three different over stories I would say. Basically there's the old growth which is left from the remnant stands of pre-settlement times, which are called yellow pines to us. And then what happened after that at the turn of the century or shortly thereafter, 1914 and 1919 were gigantic seed years and with the grazing that had taken place, extensive grazing that took place during that time period just before, there was bare ground just about everywhere. In fact, a lot of research was started in Arizona because of that problem. But anyhow, the seed catches of 1914 and 1919 are what make up the rest of ponderosa pine in Arizona and New Mexico that we have two different over stories in that situation. There are either dog hair thickets which are stagnated pines that never got past their stage because of the competition that exists there. And then there are the pole stands which somehow were scattered enough to the point where the competition allowed them to get up and get out and become relatively mature trees of today. And so the pre-settlement times where fire was a constant occurrence in ponderosa pine, and I'll go to the next slide I think that shows on almost all of the remnant trees from pre-settlement times you'll find fire scars on just about every tree. And a lot of the work that we did in starting our work in Arizona centered around fire histories. And I'm going to show you a couple of scars that come out of these trees. There are some that are on fire. Would you pass that around just so that people can see it? Well, I can show them a picture but I just soon, people don't believe me when I show them pictures. And there are those scars again. The constancy of fire in ponderosa pine in Arizona and Mexico is shown in these fire scar analyses. And on the study plots that we have outside of Flagstaff, the salt soils on the Fort Valley Experimental Forest, the overall average fire occurrence was about every two to three years from the time period you see on that scar there. And that's an excellent scar that shows extensive fire history. That's a very old tree, but it was a very small tree as you can see. And please note when you're passing that around, the outside rings there. All the trees around this particular yellow pine were cut in 1967. And you can see the release that took place. To foresters, that's probably more interesting than the fire scars themselves. So what we had in the old days was a fire that maybe didn't look like this because it was running through grass most of the time, but anyhow low intensity fires that occurred on a very, very frequent timetable now have turned into this kind of situation, which is in most cases a stand replacing fire. So the old fires pre-settlement that burned on a regular basis have now been replaced by these stand replacing fires which are devastating and have to be replanted rather than receded because of the nature of it. The culprit in all of this, as we see it anyhow, is the forest floor. And most people are not concerned, especially when you talk to people in Pacific Northwest where most of the fuel that accumulates that is being burned in prescribed fires is some kind of activity generated fuel. Whereas our fuels, although we have that kind of fuel, in broadcast prescribed fires, this is the culprit here, the forest floor. And these are some of the loadings that we've developed. This is a regression showing the depth of the forest floor and the loading and their just gigantic amounts of dry material that accumulates over time. The problem is that our decomposition rate is so slow. This is what's known as the K-value which is decomposition and it's the annual forest floor accumulation divided by the long-term equilibrium forest floor which has accumulated on those ponderose pine forests since the turn of the century. And as you see, if you were in the tropics or even down in Henry's part of the world, a K-value of 1, 1.0, would be fuel accumulating on the ground and decomposing in the same year so that it's never accumulating past a year's accumulation. Well, you can see that in Arizona and New Mexico, it's a completely different picture that .05 is the decomposition rate which, if you look at ecosystems over the world, it's more like a desert. It's very close to being a desert. That the accumulation just keeps accumulating and decomposes at a very, very slow rate and that's why fire in the old days took care of that situation. We also have, like Henry's area, an extensive lightning occurrence. South Florida is the only place in the United States that has a more dense lightning occurrence than in Arizona and New Mexico. So the ignition source was always there, the fuel was always there, the weather was always there and so constant fire was the name of the game, pre-settlement times. The work that we were doing in Arizona was similar to that that I started or continued in Florida and South Carolina and that is to develop prescribed burning rotations which in effect protect the over story. That we knew that fire had to be reinstituted into the ecosystem because it was that natural phenomenon that took care of the fuel problem and also did a lot of other things. So our studies were set up to look at different burning intervals to protect the over story. So we set up two study areas, one on basalt soils on the Fort Valley Experimental Forest outside of Flagstaff and then one on the Long Valley Experimental Forest which is a sandstone limestone derived soil. And what we did was set up increments of one, two, four, six, eight and ten year rotations and the idea was to burn those on those rotations and then try and determine which one of those would optimally protect your over story. And a lot of people look at prescribed fire in that it's a one-time operation but it is not and especially in an ecosystem as dry as Ponderosa Pond that it's a continual thing, once you start it you got to keep it going. So the first all the burn plots were done in 1976 and the conditions that fall and they're all in the fall by the way. They are not spring burns or late spring burns early summer when fire would naturally have occurred. When we first started our study, Region 3 Arizona and New Mexico, you couldn't. There was no way you could burn during that time period because May and June are zero precip months and any fires that were going during that time even if they were extinguished they would hold over. So there was a rule in the Forest Service that you just didn't burn then. So the typical time was in the fall when things could be controlled much better and so that's why we set it up as burning in the fall. The first fall that we burned was a very dry fall like many of them are and we had to do it at night. So the pictures you see there are our first burns that occurred at night. The fuel loads on the ground, you can see around this group of yellow pine trees that amounts to forest floor loadings of anywhere from 90 to 120,000 pounds to the acre equivalent right around the base of those trees and that was before those fires and that's mineral soil that you see there now. That entire amount of forest floor was consumed in the initial burn which we refer to as the first entry burn after a long period of not burning. And so the other fuels, the naturally accumulating larger fuels were also consumed almost totally in that first fire. The old punky material was burned completely up and the solid material was not consumed nearly as much. After about a year, about a year and a half after we did these burns we noticed that some of our yellow pines were starting to get yellow in the wrong places. They were getting yellow in the crowns and they're starting to fade and eventually die and to this day, 17 years later, we've lost about 46% of our large, mature yellow pines and it got us to thinking about that situation because none of those trees had been scorched in the overstory at all. You saw the fire, it's very low intensity backing fire in most cases and so we got to thinking about what the situation was and it occurred to us that these deep forest floors that were burning were aggravating things underneath. So we set up a study specifically to look at the soil heating that occurs from burning these heavy forest floors. And we have instrumented and burned probably 40 or 50 individual trees, some of them in groups like this, but it only takes an individual tree to look at the temperatures in the soil and in the cambium. And not only does it affect the root system from the burning but around the base of the tree the cambium is also affected. That ponderosa pine is known to be one of the most resistant species to fire and it is relative to low intensity fires with normal fuel loads that they experienced all their life, not the kind of thing that we find ourselves dealing with today. So we'll select a site and what we do is install thermocouples in the ground and you can see them here, this is a hole, we dig a hole about 12 to 14 inches deep and then insert six thermocouples in our case anywhere from the forest floor and soil interface down to about 12 inches. And then we ignite the area. Oh, and the cambiums are also probed too. We put a series of six thermocouples, we cut slots in the bark and insert thermocouples down into the cambium and the actual probe part of the cambium or thermocouple is in the forest floor, in the cambium at the forest floor level. And then we ignite the area and here you can see that we protect the thermocouples on the tree because they do stick out of ways and that's what you see all that aluminum foil there. And we use data loggers to record the information from the thermocouples as the fire progresses through the stand. And here we have an extensive bank of data loggers recording temperatures in the cambium of the tree and in the soil at different loadings. We try to put our thermocouples in under forest floors of different depths so that we can try and relate the depth of burn or the consumption of the burn to the temperatures. And we haven't succeeded at that very well but that's the way we try to do it. And then we put a fire through it and to date in all the trees that we've studied since 1980, we have gotten complete consumption of the forest floor around these yellow pines out to the drip line. There is a humus layer that forms in the yellow pine groves and it extends all the way to the drip line. When you get past that, the fuel is so thin that it only burns the top off, the L layer and the F layer. But it has done our experience that once a fire carries over an area. In other words, if it will carry on the litter layer, it will burn all the way to mineral soil. And we've done that in conditions up to 95% moisture content in the humus layer. It just takes a little longer to get rid of it but it does burn down through. So today we're paying for the transgressions that we've perpetrated on these stands over the last 100 years or so by allowing fire not to take its active place in the environment. After burn, to us, is not when you don't see any flames. That smoldering combustion, that glowing combustion that takes place, usually lasts for 12 to 72 hours depending on the conditions. And so the heating takes place for up to a week. We work in Sequoia National Park and we instrument a lot of the Sequoia sugar pine burns for Sequoia National Park. And the combustion process lasts for five to seven days in many cases. It takes that long to burn that course floor down. After burn, like I say, is not when the flaming takes place but after the smoldering combustion or the glowing combustion is eliminated. Here you can see on the bowl of that tree just about the entire black area is probably where the top of the forest floor is. What we do is take measuring rods, it's just rebar with a mark on it is all it is, and place those around the area where the thermocouples are. And then we measure the consumption that way by measuring the depth of what was there before and what was there and what remains afterwards. And there's like 90% of the cases, there's nothing remaining afterwards. But that's the way we measure it. And then that prediction equation I showed you in the beginning is how we figure out what the consumption is. When the glowing combustion no longer exists then we take the thermocouples out of the ground and just to see exactly where the thermocouple was, we try to put them in there 12 inches long so when you insert them in the ground you don't know exactly where the end of the thermocouple is. So when we dig them out, we're not only measuring the moisture content changes that took place during that time period, but also exactly where that thermocouple was. And here you can see, this is a better idea of how much forest floor there is there. The bottom of those yellow protectors is right at the forest floor line and you can see there's a long way between that and what's left. And what you see is ash and you're really not even looking at the mineral soil. And this, I don't know if you can see that or not. You can see with the thermocouple we have cut the bark away exactly where the end of the thermocouple is and just to show the positioning of it in that case. These are some of the traces that we've taken that I brought to show you of what kind of temperatures exist during these prescribed fires in these mature yellow pine sites. These are cambium temperatures here and soils and cambiums run about the same temperature year-round and it's somewhere between 40 and 50 degrees Fahrenheit. And these trees have lived under those conditions for millennia and all of a sudden one day we go out and light a match and they're now up to, you can see that one trace there on one spot in the cambium is up to 120 degrees. Protoplasm coagulates in tree parts somewhere between 140 and 147 degrees and there are increments of duration and lower temperatures which will also do the same thing. And that we're working on now as a matter of fact. But you can see here that in all the cases we're above 90 degrees Fahrenheit for some period of time that this is looking at a two and a half day period of elevated temperatures. That's another cambium temperature trace. That's another cambium trace. These are just examples of what happens. Here are the soil temperatures. Now they're all starting in the 40 to 50 degree range and you can see the very lowest one on this chart here is 12 inches below the soil surface and it reached eventually over 90 degrees. So there's a lot of heat being put out. Here's another one a little further away from the tree and the lower probes are showing 70 to 80 degrees. That one's a long way away from the tree and the lower ones don't get much above 70 or 80. These are just examples of some of the conditions that we've monitored. There down to 12 inches were up over 160 degrees. So we have a problem. We need to put fire back into this system to keep it from completely collapsing. But yet we're paying a fairly heavy price in some cases when we do that. It's one of those rock and hard place kind of things. We have found however that our work on our limestone flats area, when we burn that the first time, we don't have but maybe a half a dozen trees that were killed by that initial fire. And the difference was that the soil moisture was much, much, much higher than our first burns at chimney spring and the conditions that we've tested thereafter. That heavy moisture in the soil becomes a heat sink and that even though probably the same amount of temperature or energy is being expended by that forest floor, it is being absorbed by the moisture in the ground that it takes a lot of energy to get rid of that water in the soil. Whereas the dry soils are allowing, although it doesn't transfer in dry soils quite as well, it goes directly to the roots whereas it's trying to get rid of water in a wet soil type. And so we find that that's essentially what the differences are. And like I say we are paying today for a lot of the transgressions of not allowing an important part of an ecosystem to play its part. There are just so many things that don't happen in especially a very dry ecosystem like ponderosa pine. We were talking just ahead of this about nutrient cycling that with decomposition rates as low as they are in a dry system like that, there's very little nutrient cycling going on. And I wish we had the time to go into that because we find gigantic differences in the nitrogen component, the available nitrogen component, the ammonium and nitrate after burning that in controlled situations one to three parts per million of ammonium is common. And right after a burn we go in these yellow pine sites, we go up to close to 100 parts per million and it remains for about four years. And our four year rotations are able to surge that nutrient cycle every time we burn it. So there are a lot of things that aren't happening in these ponderosa pine ecosystems that did over a long period of time. And so like I say we're caught in a dilemma and there are ways around it. A lot of the dilemma has been taken care of because a lot of the heavy or the big mature trees have been logged out of Arizona and New Mexico. And so the upcoming crop of black jacks or the bigger poles will soon take over. And if we get a burning program into those early enough then we don't have to worry about that situation. Questions? Yes sir? During your studies you said you had 120,000, so I take that to be 60 times per acre. Now your fuel loading was basically the needle cast off the trees. Anything less than an inch in diameter. Okay so you were getting these type of intensities on 60 tons of acre of basically one hour fuel class? That's correct. The humus makes the greater the humus depth the more the consumption. But that up to the drip line the humus layer is deep enough for total consumption all the way to the drip line in those situations. And right up next to the bowl of the tree it could be higher loading than that. And that's just an average from the inside to the outside. Were any of your studies just in basically a needle cast type of fuel loading or did you do any in grass? Our grass essentially the type our ecosystem is ponderosa pine Arizona fescue. Well the Arizona fescue component is minute and you can dig down under these heavy forest floors and you can find the skeletons of Arizona fescue. But in 17 years now we have not seen the Arizona fescue come back that the seed bank is so low at this point that it just does not revive. It's going to take some restoration type ecology I think to get that Arizona fescue back into that system. We get a lot of toad flags and mullin and thistle you know the things that come in after you devastate a site. But we don't see the grasses coming back in. In the pole stands and dog hair thickets we do not consume all the forest floor. That just does not happen you take off the L layer and part of the F layer and everything else is left essentially. And the condition I explained to you is just around these big old mature yellow pines. In Arizona. Yes. It also I'll just step back. Like I say we work in Sequoia National Park and their situation is identical only they have forest floor loads like this all over. Not just underneath the crowns that they're those sequestans are so dense with fur and sugar pine and other things that it's the same thing. If you can get a fire to carry across the top it's going to burn the mineral soil. Yeah but I'm just trying to correlate that situation to be after northeastern Oregon and those fuel loads you're describing are very very high. You're talking about a fuel layer and a load very close to the surface it's actually actually almost like a peak. It's probably a fire you're describing that would be long and duration. Yes. Days. And in fact it is so that the glowing combustion that takes place very little smoke coming from it's extremely efficient fire. But you can't see it because the ash layer builds up from the top to the bottom which further insulates and drives that heat into the ground and it's it just goes on. The reason I'm asking you that you gave us some temperatures of 160 degrees and 12 inches is quite high. You don't have any data. Let me tell you something about sequoia. We go down to 18 inches and get temperatures not 160 degrees but they're elevated. For this area we don't have that much time. Our time guys did not drive to Oregon. We do have more compensation. But we do still have grass on us. So we don't have these cooked in the field here. It's working now. Okay let's any other questions one more question. Go ahead. Yeah all of the studies you did were in areas that had not had recent fire intervals. Did you do any studies in areas where you'd burn and then gone back after three or four years and burned again to look at the heat pulse and mortality. Yeah our whole study is based on burning intervals. And so we've been burning now for 17 years on these different intervals one two four six eight and ten years. And once that initial load is gone you never have that situation ever again. And that's the whole point that you've got to start someplace. But once you do then you don't have those same kind of problems. Then you can work into a program that even at eight years we don't get a tremendous heat buildup. And when we do it's only in the very top layers. We do not get it down lower than two or three inches. And so it's just not the same. It's just that initial first entry when you have this gigantic load on the ground. Okay let's go on to the out reaches and check with Burns. See what Burns has to ask. Anybody have any questions at Burns? Yeah you're saying that large downed woodies were historically never a part of the ponderosa pine environment. Not to the extent they are today. They couldn't possibly have been because if you had a fire covering an area every two to four years it'd be difficult for that to remain very long. Now some of it does. If it doesn't consume in the first time and it chars. You know what it's like trying to get charcoal to get started. It kind of protects itself after that. So yes there was large material pre-settlement times, but not nearly what we have today I don't think. Any other questions? Well how important is, well you know we hear about long term site productivity, micro-rise eye, etc. And we're getting pressure to leave a considerable number of these large pieces out there. But you know you can't get fire in large downed woodies in the same piece of ground. I know it's a problem all over and I think the soils people have a very different view of what happens and what naturally happened in these environments. And I hate to disagree with them but I don't agree with leaving all that woody material out there because I don't think it ever existed before. Okay let's go on to Blue Mountain Pendleton. Any questions there folks? No questions. Go ahead get close to it. Any questions? Go ahead. We see you. We don't have any questions. Get a little closer. She said no questions. Great. Thanks. We'll go on to John Day then. I have one quick question. What was the fuel load you said again, 90 to what pounds per acre? Was that underneath the pine? Yeah in, well I'm just looking at my depth weight relationships in the area that we work. Two and a half inches of forest floor is 20 tons and you go up to six inches and it's greater than 60 tons to the acre. And you've got to remember that these are concentrated loads around in these yellow pine sites and they accumulate a whole lot more fuel in a year's time than do the pole stands or the dog hair thickets. Any other questions? I have a question on nutrient cycling. You mentioned that the nitrogen levels increased after the fire. Is there any sort of nitrogen fixing plants? What was the last part of that? Come back on that again if you would. We couldn't hear the last part of your question. How would nitrogen be replaced? That's lost when nitrogen's lost in the consumption of the fuel during the fire itself. What is the magnitude of fixing it? How does the magnitude get fixed back in the system? It's a direct deposit as far as we can see. And then the nitrate levels after that ammonia is in the soil. The critters get to working on that and the nitrate levels increase say the next spring after and continue to increase for about two years after that. But it's a direct deposition of ammonia into the soil. Another question? I'd like to follow up though. I'm sure that's where the ammonium and nitrate come from, or the ammonium comes from as direct deposition. But as we burn the fuel, nitrogen is lost from the site in the fire. And is that replaced into the ecosystem through any pathway? That was the last part of that. Is that replaced into the ecosystem through any pathway? Oh, yeah, the continuation of needle cast. Like I say, on a four-year rotation, we surge that ammonium level every time we burn. So yes, we lose a lot in that initial fire, but what you put into the system is far more than gets in there naturally. And then each time you burn, you've still got this gigantic accumulation that occurs every year, and it just keeps recycling that system. I'm sort of going to break this up into two different parts, and I feel much more comfortable talking about the first part of my talk because I'll be talking about my own research. Then I'm going to try to extend some of my findings over the last decade or so of research through situations that I actually have read about, because quite honestly I've never really been in eastern Oregon forest. I hope to visit some tomorrow morning on my way out of here. But I'm going to try to extend some of my, like I said, my research findings and see if I can make some suggestions about things that might happen with the amphibians and reptiles that occur here in eastern Oregon. I think we're ready to go. Fast questions. Be sure and push your buttons because they are working. Okay, thanks. The reason I study or am interested in fire ecology is shown right here. As Steve alluded to, for four months a year, Central Florida actually leads the world in the frequency of lightning strikes. In certain times, June, July, August, we can record 2,000 lightning strikes in a county in an hour to give you some idea of the intensity. I'm going to talk very briefly about two different kinds of habitats. The first one is shown here. Let me see if I can zoom in on this a little bit. The first one is a kind of habitat called scrub habitat, which is shown here by this really dark red stuff. It occurs mostly along the central portion of Florida and little patches along the outer ridges and some of it actually gets up into Alabama. I have considerably more information about the yellow habitat, which is a sand hill habitat. I'll show you some slides and explain each of those to you, but I just want you to get some feeling for the distribution of those habitats in Florida. Again, the scrub habitat is a much older habitat. It's called ancient scrub. Ancient in Florida means it's 40,000 or so years old, and it probably existed when most of Florida was nothing but a series, perhaps even a series of islands, which is now down the central portion of what's called the Lake Wales Ridge in Florida, when the sea levels were a bit higher than they are today. Scrub habitat is characterized by different kinds of trees. This is a sand pine, which I think I can show you a better shot of that in a little while. It's a relatively open habitat, at least even in mature scrub habitat. It's relatively open. It's like rosemary and a whole series of plants whose closest relatives are actually in southern Arizona in the desert southwest United States. There are some very definite ties, both through the botanical and zoological findings in sand hill and scrub habitat in Florida with the desert southwest. Again, for historical reasons and things that I'm not going to go into today, but it really makes a pretty interesting story. I'll just show you a couple of shots of the scrub habitat. The cones that you find on these pine trees are called serotonous cones and they require fire actually to cause the opening of the cone to germinate. So that opening occurs after the stand is burned, so you get very even-aged stands. And if you notice here, the diameters of these trees are very similar in diameter. So you get a stand-for-stand replacement. Scrub habitat doesn't burn all that frequently, perhaps every 70 or 80-year periodicity. Some scrubs perhaps a little bit more frequent than that. But there's simply not enough fuel accumulating in these scrubs to really support a very high frequency of fire. So when they do burn, it is a devastating, it's a catastrophic burn. Many of the scrubs in Florida, although there isn't much left quite honestly, there isn't much of any habitat left in Florida quite honestly. I think I'm far enough away from Florida to say that. We are doing some control burning. We're trying to, again, learn more about these habitats before there's nothing left to study. Fire comes through. This is perhaps a year or so after a fire. You can see some of the stems and so on that have been left. It is devastating and that would be in a few years after this, you'd see lots of seedlings and you'd again get the replacement with an even-aged stand. Some of the control burnings that we're doing further south from Tampa from where I live, this is actually at a biological research station in Central Florida called Archibald Biological Research Station. It's about 10,000 or so acres and it burned in different periodicities. And this is where I've conducted some of my studies. The fires are hot, very intense, and devastating. This is a palmetto stand. All of these are the trunks of palmettoes. I'll show you a palmetto in a few minutes. And you would think that this is absolutely totally wiped out. But in reality, these palmettoes, if you were to come back, I'd give them two or three months to get back, but they would come back and they would be green again and can survive even that intense heat. These are probably all genetically the same individual. They're all probably related to one another. Perhaps even all the palmettoes in Florida might actually be related to one another. The other habitat, which I'm going to talk a bit more about in a little bit more detail, is what I showed you earlier was the yellow habitat, the sand hill habitat. And it's characterized by turkey oaks. I don't know that you need to see the leaves very well, but it's a fairly characteristic oak leaf. This particular photograph here is taken of a patch of sand hill that hasn't burned in about 30 years. Sand hill has a very rapid or very high fire periodicity, perhaps even every five to seven or ten years. Again, one of the goals of our research is to try to establish what a natural periodicity might be so that we can manage, use this as a management tool for those little patches of natural habitat that are left in Florida. Another shot we'll show, this is again some of the palmettoes that I mentioned to you. And notice that there isn't really much ground covering here at all. The major grass in here is a ristana, which is a wire grass, which is a fire promoting and in fact requires fire for the grass to set seed. So this is a fire maintained ecosystem. Historically, there's very good evidence to suggest that Florida perhaps used to burn perhaps even from coast to coast before we got in there and build all the bridges and highways and fragmented that habitat up into lots of tiny little parcels. Clearly fire was much more able to spread from one side of the state to the other. And even the native Indians and so on were very good at using fire and maintained their systems through perhaps, I don't think they call them prescribed burns, but nevertheless they set the fires. But you also have to remember that Florida has a bit of a different history than most of North America quite honestly because it's had a European influence for hundreds of years. So it's very difficult for a biologist like myself to know what is a natural system in Florida because it really, we don't know where to go to find a natural system. It's all been altered to say over the last four or five hundred years in ways that we're having a hard time now piecing it back together. But clearly fire was an integral part of the natural history of all of the upland system. And again, I'm just talking about two of the upland systems, the scrub and the sandhill. Well at the university where I teach, the University of South Florida, we've been doing fire ecology research since the mid-70s. We have plots that are broken up or relatively large chunk of land is broken up into small plots and these plots are burned on different periodicities much like what Steve was saying. Some plots on a one year cycle, two years, five years, seven years, nine years and so on. Other plots that have been protected from fire for perhaps as many as 30 years and we sort of call them control plots, but they're really not control in the real sense that a scientist might use the word control. But again, we do a spring burn, spring to perhaps summer burns. The greatest intensity of lightning, well again just so you're understanding why we're doing it, our summer season starts about mid-May and that's when our lightning storms begin. And every afternoon, virtually every afternoon we generate our own conductive currents and our own thunder and lightning storms. So the greatest frequency of fires actually occur in May and June and at that time you get the greatest amount of acreage that would be burned during those months. So again, we do control burning, prescribed burning. And I'm a zoologist, I'm interested in the animal responses to those fires and I will get to it in a minute I promise you. We can actually control, very much control the canopy cover. This is a plot that burns every two years. I just want to give you a feeling for what fires can do to these different kinds of habitats. This is a plot that burns every two years. You'll notice there's relatively sparse canopy compared to those first few shots I showed you where in those the canopy cover was perhaps as much as 70 or 80 percent. In a place like this that burns every two years we get a canopy cover that's down to perhaps 20 or so percent. This is a plot that burns every five years and you get maybe 30 or so percent coverage. So this is about midway into a five year cycle and you can see the tremendous amount of regrowth that we get in that five year period. Tremendous amount of grasses and herbs and so on. Well, let's get to the herbs. One animal that we have that you don't have that is truly an integral part of the system is the gopher tortoise. And really it is because of the gopher tortoise that I have an interest in fire ecology. I started studying gopher tortoises or a dozen or so years ago when I first got to Florida and the gopher tortoise and fire brought my research together actually. Gopher tortoises are such an important part of the system that we really refer to them as a keystone species. In the absence of a gopher tortoise the upland systems in Florida in particular but in other parts of the southeast as well will actually decay and the biodiversity will decline precipitously in the absence of a gopher tortoise. It's not the tortoise per se that's the integral part of this but it's the burrows that they dig. Tortoises dig extensive burrows. This just illustrates the mouth of the burrow. Here you can see perhaps on the screen where I'm showing you. But that burrow could be 30 to 50 feet in length and by the time you're at the bottom of that burrow you can be 25 feet below the surface of the ground. And that burrow serves as a refuge for a tremendous number of species. We have documented over 300 other species of organisms that live and spend time in that gopher tortoise burrow. So what brought this together then is in the absence of fire when tree canopy increases gopher tortoises abandon that habitat and hence the burrows eventually will decay. In fact in a year or so a burrow will decay. So in the absence of fire the tortoises are forced out of the habitat. The burrows decay and the whole biodiversity goes down the tube. And that occurs in decades. I mean this is not something where we're talking about centuries or millennia to occur. This can actually occur in two to three decades in this kind of sand hill habitat. So again my interest as a herpetologist and gopher tortoise is in other organisms and their response to fire that again brought these things together in my mind. So we don't have the equivalent reptile here in eastern Oregon but you do have other burrowing animals that I'm sure provide refuge for many of the other snakes and salamanders and so on that you'll find here. Again one last shot of the tortoise about to enter into her burrow. The tortoise gets up to about a foot or so in length, perhaps ten pounds or so and they're just avid diggers. They just can displace a tremendous amount of ground. You just can't believe how well they can dig through the soils. Again we're also talking about Florida where I use the word soil very loosely with a soil scientist here. It's really sand. It has no horizon so it's very difficult to even call them soils. Some of the species that I've worked with and I'll just share some of my findings with you without going through and showing you data. These things are published if you care to go back and read some of the papers. I gladly will provide that information for you. This is a six-lined race runner. It is an animal that reaches its absolute maximum abundance in areas that burn very, very frequently. So it's an animal that typically inhabits very wide open habitats so it clearly is attracted to very high periodicities. It does extremely well in our one- and two-year plots. In plots that don't burn in 20 or 25 years you rarely will see one except around the very edge of those plots. So clearly again you can see the relationship between fire periodicity and the relative abundance of some of our amphibians or reptiles. This is a skink and you have a similar skink here. A skink is just a family of reptiles, skinkadi. We have data to suggest that really high periodicities of fire actually are not very good for skinks. They spend an awful lot of their time at and below the, or right at the interface between the soils and whatever leaf cover or litter might be present. So if you continually remove that leaf litter you're really altering their habitat in a way that is not very conducive for them. This is just another species that occurs just a little bit further north in Florida. But skinks have a behavior and it's true of your skink here in Oregon as well where the females will actually spend time with their young and the females will move their eggs in and out of shelters and so on on a day to day basis. So while a female is tending her eggs, and this happens to be an individual just coming out of an egg right here, while the female is tending her eggs you don't see adult females in the population at all and she will spend a good two months or so in seclusion with her eggs. So if you're burning at the time of the year when she is tending her eggs you can probably be quite destructive to the skinks as well. They typically will nest in very moist areas or relatively moist areas below logs or actually sometimes in logs much as this one was. We just tore the log away just before I took this photograph. But again even our more moderate periodicities of five year or seven year periodicities does not seem to affect these in a detrimental way. So it's this really almost unnaturally high periodicity that seems to have a negative effect upon skinks. We have a large variety of snakes. This happens to be one of the more common snakes in the very loose soils in central Florida. This is a pine needle for measure. So this is an animal that is mature at perhaps eight or ten inches in length and spends almost its entire life below the ground. Again fire on any periodicity doesn't seem to have any detrimental effects upon the relative abundance of this particular snake. Another snake that since I have all these tools here and I can play with them this is a ring neck snake belly up. You have ring neck snakes here. It's actually the same species. You can see if you look at the very end of the pen there's the ring around its neck. Again we have somewhat limited data but our data do suggest that ring necks are not either positively or negatively influenced by any of our fire periodicities. In the absence of fire however the relative abundance of these animals decreases. So they are dependent upon some kind of fire periodicity even our ten year fields support pretty high populations of ring necks. But they're not terribly common. It's not nearly as common as this is that Florida crown snake the one I showed you just a few minutes ago. Actually I'll throw in a little herpetology here. This ring neck snake regurgitated this Florida crown snake. So this is actually a predator-prey relationship we're looking at here as well. In this situation the prey organism was actually a little bit larger than the predator. Think about that. We have a variety of frogs, amphibians that live in and around Central Florida. Actually throughout the whole Southeast United States we've got a fairly high abundance of amphibians. This happens to be one of the more common. It's a green tree frog. You have Pacific tree frogs and others that occur throughout this area. As you might imagine tree frogs as most amphibians are found in close association with water. I'll show you a few minutes that get several hundred or perhaps even a thousand meters away from the nearest water. But most tree frogs are really tied to water. So unless your fire is a catastrophic fire where you would burn right up to the edge of water these guys would seek refuge. And they're extremely well adept at avoiding fires. When we set a fire there's a line of tree frogs moving away from that fire several hundred meters in advance of the fire line. Long before a human would be able to detect the fire unless you were able to see it of course. But these guys are really good at avoiding the heat and the nasty aspects of fire. Another small frog, it's called hyla femoralis and the name comes from the fact that it has some yellow spots on its thigh. This animal occurs in all of the habitats that I mentioned to you both the sand hill and the scrub habitat. And it actually lives very often in the palmetto leaves. And when palmetto leaves burn we've measured temperatures in excess of a thousand degrees centigrade in palmetto. So we know that they burn very hot, very very hot. And yet again you can go into an area a few weeks after a burn and you'll find all of the amphibians back there. There probably is a decline actually several weeks or several months after a fire. Perhaps reflecting the fact that the insects probably declined for some short period of time. But in a year or so after a fire clearly there's almost no evidence at all. Negative evidence or evidence that suggests that the populations of amphibians or reptiles are declining because of that fire. We also find with perhaps one or two exceptions over the last ten years where I've been doing this almost no direct effects of fire. That is we're not toasting the animals out there. Box turtles and a few species of turtles have a problem avoiding the fire. Certainly not the gopher tortoise because he could just run right down his burrow. But there are a few species of larger, I think most of you know what a box turtle looks like, would have a bit of a problem. Although you don't have those kinds of turtles here again so I can't speak that it would have any kind of... It would create similar problems here for you in Eastern Oregon. This is a toad. You have a toad here which I'll mention in a few minutes. Toads are often found some great distances away from water. But those toads that are found in Florida at any rate and I suspect is true here, away from water spend most of their life below the ground. They're excellent burrowers and can easily burrow down to a depth of a foot or so. Again this is Florida that I'm talking about with no soils and nothing but really sand. But they are very good at avoiding the heat of the fire or actually the heat of the day. Yesterday afternoon it was 94 degrees in Tampa so it's... I've measured soil temperatures. The surface of sand is 140 degrees in Florida. So it isn't just the heat of a fire that these organisms have to learn to avoid, it's the heat of the day as well. So any organism that lives in Florida has to deal with different kinds of heat. We have a variety of snakes. This is what we call a pine snake. Throughout much of the country it's called the gopher snake. It's the same species again, Pituitophis melanolucus. We've done work with radio transmitters and so on. They spend in excess of 97% of their life below ground. It's a large animal. It can get up to 5 or 6 feet in length. They eat mice and in particular, or rodents is perhaps more accurate, and in particular a gopher, a pocket gopher which also burrows below the ground. So these animals spend an awful lot of time in the burrows created by the pocket gopher and every once in a while will ingest one or two given the opportunity. Again, the point I'm trying to make is that we see fire, you know, as humans we look at fire and so often we see it as a really negative thing. I don't think the amphibians and reptiles are seeing it quite through those same eyes. This is a coach whip. You have a similar species, not exactly the same species, but a similar species that occurs throughout this whole region of the country. Again, a very excellent burrowing animal. It's a bit more terrestrial than the pine snake, but an excellent burrow and will often seek shelter down gopher toward his burrows or any of the rodent burrows or squirrels. Some of our squirrels actually create some small burrows and you of course have ground squirrels which do burrow. So again, I can't tell you, we don't have enough data on these larger snakes. They're just too rare, too uncommon to have enough data that we've actually published on. But there are every indication that they can survive fires quite well. Excuse me. Right just through and one more snake. This is another small burrowing snake. Again, comparable to some of the animals that you have in eastern Oregon that just spends an awful lot of time below ground. This is one that happens to eat reptile eggs. And of course you don't find reptile eggs very often sitting on the ground anyway. They're usually buried down in the ground. This actually will find and seek out reptile eggs below the ground and ingest the egg without ever coming to the surface. Two lizards that I'll, last two lizards I think that I'll show you are very, very similar to two lizards that you have here. The same genus again. These are fence lizards. You have two scoloperous lizards out here. This is the eastern fence lizard. Excellent climber, but also an excellent burrower. They nest below the ground and spend an awful lot of their time below the ground. The one that occurs in our scrub habitat here is the scoloperous wood eye. It just became a federally protected species. It is now a threatened species. Again, primarily because of habitat destruction. Obviously a very good tree climber. This is in an oak tree. But again, when it's not up in the oak trees and active during the day, it is always below the ground. The fires, regardless of the time of the year or even the time of the day that you're burning, these guys can avoid the heat of the fire and avoid it quite well. We have very few salamanders. This is an animal that actually came from Hillsborough County which is where Tampa is. For a variety of reasons. Our soil conditions are poor. We go through very wet periods of the year but we also have a fairly long extended dry period of the year and these guys really can't tolerate the dry aspects. I only put this in to remind myself to mention something about your salamanders. You have a few salamanders here that I'll point out again in just a few minutes that are burrowing salamanders. They actually belong to a family of salamanders called the mole salamanders. And as you can all imagine, mole salamanders are named that because they spend an awful lot of time below the ground. This is a Gary Larson cartoon to sort of summarize what a lot of people feel about fire. It's frustrating. You don't quite know what to do with it and it means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. The word down here, if you can't read it, is fire and you can see the lady screaming fire out the window. Well, when I was asked to come here and talk to you, again quite honestly, my background is strictly in zoology. I'm a herpetologist, if anything. I went and started doing some quick research on fire in eastern Oregon. And I asked a few questions of myself that I'm going to share with you very quickly. Again, I think you probably know this stuff better than I do. One is, well, what kind of history does Oregon have for fires? And clearly you can go back over 100 years and document some extremely large fires going through the tail hook or the tail hook. It was a Freudian slip, I'm afraid. Up into very recently, eastern Oregon in 1986 and 1987 had some extensive fires. And again, you probably know that far better than I do. And I also asked myself, well, what kind of fire periodicities do you find in these different kinds of forest in Oregon? And I was surprised quite honestly that some of your different forest types have fairly high periodicities. From the literature I was able to find ponderosa pine and here is listed as a 15-year cycle. Obviously there's, in other places, it might even be more frequent than that. You also have subalpine in other places, other kinds of forest that burn far less frequently. Again, just to sort of giving you the kind of background that I felt I needed to go through to talk to you. Then I went to, as a herpetologist, I thought, well, what kind of amphibians and reptiles really do we find in eastern Oregon? And perhaps now you can see the reason why I showed you some of the slides. The first two lizards are fence lizards and I tried to make the point when I was going through some of my data that I had in Florida that fence lizards are extremely well-adept at getting out of the way of fire. I threw in side blots and short horns. If you looked at a map, they're found in eastern Oregon, not quite exactly where we are now in eastern Oregon, but in much open, more arid conditions. Turtles, there's only a painted turtle and that's an aquatic turtle and I wouldn't worry too much about it. One snake that I have a bit of a question about is a rubber boa. It is an animal that we don't know a whole heck of a lot about and is, in fact, a protected species. I mentioned a ring neck snake to you, whip snakes, several of the others, garter snakes and so on. All of these, in my opinion, quite honestly, are not likely to be found in really high dense forests. These are animals that are more likely to be found on edges or ecotowns or in areas where you'd find some kind of open habitat because most of these are actually either mammal or fish eaters and obviously the fish eaters are going to need the water to forage in, but you don't find really high densities of mammals in really high overgrowth forests. So again, if the concern is what is prescribed burning or what is fire going to do to the amphibians or reptiles that occur here, my feeling is that it's probably going to actually increase their abundance, if anything. We can do the same thing with amphibians. If I could find mine, here it is. You have several... several amphibian salamanders and the neurons are frogs. Again, both of these salamanders occur to a family, the ambistamatid that are mole salamanders and spend the vast majority of their life below ground. The frogs that I mentioned to you, you have a spade foot toad, actually I didn't mention, but we also have a spade foot toad in Florida and they're burrowing animals. They spend the vast majority of their life below the ground. They come up to forage or they will come up to certain times of the year during very wet periods of the year for reproductive reasons. But again, they're going to the water to do this. The tail frog is an aquatic species. Western toad is a good burrower. Pacific tree frog, I can't say a whole heck of a lot about. They occur in a variety of habitats, a huge variety of habitats, as a matter of fact. But the last two species here, the spotted and leopard frog are rannids and again are primarily aquatic amphibians. So my guess is that even if you were, all of these amphibians will wander away from water at times for foraging and for those kinds of reasons. But when they are far away from water and they're not foraging, they are burrowed down well into the ground. Well, I'm obviously running a little long on this, but let me just sort of cut to the quick here. It seems to me that one of the things that one should be concerned about is prescribed burning. We've been doing it in the southeast United States actually for several decades, and there are researchers around the world that are interested and have been studying prescribed burns now for decades, quite honestly. And if your goal, again, I'm speaking as a herpetologist, not as a forester, if the goal is to try to get the system back to a natural system or as close to a natural system as we think it can be, then clearly burning is a part, an integral part of all of these systems. I suspect that's true for all North American upland systems. It's just the periodicity that we're talking about. So one of the things you want, one of the things that has come out of the research, if we can just look at this a little bit. Again, from my opinion, from my position, you want to minimize the effects of a prescribed burn on large rotten logs and on the forest floor. Those things, I think, for a variety of reasons, need to be protected as much as can be. Now clearly, as you just heard, that first burn is a difficult one. When you've kept fire out for a century, you're going to do some damage. There's simply no way about it. I don't think there's any way to avoid that. But one of the things you certainly should consider is burning at the right time of the year to minimize the effects upon wildlife. And the right time of the year is when there's a high moisture content. So there's a relationship here between fire duration and moisture content, and these arrows are going in opposite directions. So if you can burn under the wettest possible conditions, obviously it has to be relatively dry to carry the fire, or at least reasonably dry to carry the fire, but you burn when things are as wet as they can, you would cut down on the damage to even the large fuels, of course, and then the forest floor and the large rotten logs. And I think that would go a long way in protecting the amphibians or reptiles that if they are in those forests that haven't been burned in a long period of time are certainly going to be found in the litter layer or below that litter layer at any rate. And again, from my way of thinking, well, as we had this conversation earlier, sooner or later the forests are going to burn. There's simply nothing we are going to do to stop that from occurring. What we want to do is minimize the hazards of those fires. And we can minimize those hazards by prescribed fires. And it might take, again, as Steve mentioned, it's not just something you could go in and do one time. I think you have to... Once you break that ground and start using a prescribed burn, it's something that you have to maintain for a long period of time until you've got that system back to where you thought natural periodicities might again be able to take over. Now, that's not even possible in Florida. It may still be possible out here. We have 15 million people in Florida. A thousand people a day move to Florida. Think about that, folks. We simply can't... There's no such thing as natural in Florida at any rate. The patches of land that are there have to be managed. We do get some natural fire, even in our ecological research area where we do a lot of fire ecology. In the last decade, we had three natural fires. Fortunately, in a fear with our fire research, there were in places where the fires were sort of irrelevant to our research. But our habitats are now so fragmented that even if a fire did start, the likelihood of it spreading and doing any kind of real... of functioning as a natural fire is almost... It just can't happen anymore. The areas are so fragmented and so on. Again, I guess if there is a bottom line here. What we see as the best technique, the way to maintain the highest biodiversity is to maintain a mosaic of habitats. Have plots of land that burn on different periodicities, different cycles, some that burn often, some that don't burn too often at all, some perhaps that don't burn at all over much longer periods of time. But it is that mosaic that seems to be the critical part for maintaining the highest biodiversity. And I'm not just speaking of amphibians and reptiles. That also includes all of the vertebrates as well as the plants. The way to maintain the highest plant species diversity is to keep the patchiness in the habitats. And you can accomplish that by prescribed burning on different periodicities. And I thank you. If there are questions, I'd be glad to answer them. What you're saying is we are on a maybe 100-year cycle of fire suppression. I don't think any of us have ever heard a biologist or zoologist suggest that maybe we have some amphibians that are maybe a reason they're noticeably short in pop in numbers. Maybe because of this, but this is really enlightening for us Northwesterners. I think amphibians are having other problems. I'm not trying to... I don't know if you're familiar with the idea that there's a worldwide amphibian decline. At least there's a suspected worldwide amphibian decline. I don't think we could attribute all of that to fire suppression. But clearly, again, I can't... I don't just don't know how comfortable I am extrapolating from the information we have in Florida. But clearly, if we suppress fire for even a few decades, we can see a precipitous decline in the number of vertebrates that use those forests. There's simply no question about that. Others? Yes. Yeah, Henry, I think what... you're bucking a little bit of conventional wisdom around here, and we go to great lengths currently to try and keep fire out of our riparian areas and our riparian zone. And I understand you're somewhat out of way beyond your eco-tone here. So if... I'm wondering whether that relationship, what you said about fire or currents, and those riparian areas in the relationship of amphibians, whether it's going to have an effect here in the Northwest? I honestly wouldn't think so. These organisms just didn't appear here a hundred years ago. And if we go back a thousand years or ten thousand years, my guess is that occasionally the fires went right up to the edge of any aquatic system. So again, you're really not going to... I don't think you can destroy the habitat to the point where you would actually cause the extinction of these species. I think you could knock them back, but again, if you're looking at something over a longer period of time, my guess is that the recovery would actually supersede the level that now exists. So if you're looking for a long-term management, and again, I'm talking about in perpetuity, you may see a three- or five-year decline in some of these species after you put through a hot, a real, if you will, a catastrophic kind of fire. All evidence suggests, and it's not just from here, it's from Australia, it's from Africa, it's from other continents as well, that the animals recover and do remarkably well and actually get back to... the relative abundance exceeds what it was prior to the fire. Okay, we're turned on to burns. Do burns have anything that they'd like to ask, Henry? I have two questions. The first one is, what is your duration of heat in the prescribed fires in your five-year rough? Second question is, is it true that the threatened endangered animals, or the most of them, like red, cockated woodpecker, I believe it is, in Florida depends on prescribed fire or natural fire to exist? The second answer is yes, they do require fire. And I think I could safely say that virtually all the species in Florida, whether they're endangered or not, do require some fire periodicity. The first question I think you asked me about, the duration of the burn in the five-year plots, our plots burn very, very quickly. We're talking about fires that will sweep through let's just say a 10-acre plot in perhaps 12 minutes, and within 10 minutes after that fire you can walk through and it's beginning to cool down. But again, it is because of that periodicity. You burn up that fuel very, very quickly. It's primarily grasses and herbaceous material that you're burning as well as the palmettoes and those things. But the fire is very quick and short duration. Did that answer your question? Yes, thanks. Thank you. Have a question from Pendleton? No questions. No questions? Okay, thank you. John Day? Any questions from John Day? No questions. All right, thanks. Go to Ontario. Any questions at Ontario? No questions. Any questions from Wallowa? Any questions from Wallowa? No questions? Okay, thank you. One question? Was there a question? Did we pass somebody up? Okay. Okay. I don't think we're... We got our... Hang in there, buddy. Okay. Let's see. John Day, John Day had a question last time we passed up. Wasn't John Day? Okay, let's go back to John Day. They had a question they wanted to ask Steve, I believe. One of the fellows there. You want to ask your question of Steve in John Day there? Right. I was wondering about the layer of the depth of the duff on the big pine and he had a 46% die ratio What... What can you do about that? How can you avoid the death? The one thing that we have found is that the soil moisture being high has a lot to do with it. It becomes a heat sink and a lot of that energy is absorbed by the water in the soil and thus doesn't get to the root systems. Our two situations were very dry soil burn and the other was very wet and we lost lots of trees in the dry situation and virtually none in the wet situation. Did that take care of it? Yes, thank you. Any other questions there folks? Any other questions? Can I interject them? That goes hand in hand with the point I was trying to make at the very end of this. That is if you really are going to try to minimize the detrimental effects of the fire on the trees or the wildlife I think you have to try to burn at least the first burn has to be under fairly wet conditions. It's not a pretty burn it's not a very complete burn but it might actually make that first step a little less detrimental and having that high moisture content you're certainly protecting the forest floor that's providing insulation for the roots of the trees and it's certainly providing insulation for any of the organisms that are likely to be burrowed down below that forest floor. Any other questions? I think we've got a complex system here I think we heard last week that there were some plants that don't do real well under conditions where we have prescribed burnings at times of the year that's not natural and so when we choose the times of the year that are more moist we may lose some of our species that are adapted to for fires because they're not present when fires normally occur in the dry times of the year so it could be a very complex situation. One of the things I skipped over but I'm going to try to allude to what we call focal species and if you do have species that have specific requirements perhaps the rubber ball would be as close as I could get from the amphibians or reptiles that I was talking about and if that organism is such that you really have to pay special attention to it then I think you have to work around that. I would rather even step back and step further and that is before you do anything burn or not burn is you should really know exactly what you want to accomplish what is the goal why do we want to do this and if everybody in this room or everybody in eastern Oregon came up with the same answer then life would be very pretty and you would know exactly what you want to accomplish but again I feel like the outside are coming in here we deal with this all the time in terms of management I'm up against the wall constantly in Florida in terms of making management decisions on habitat the first question I have to ask is what is it you want to accomplish do we really want to re-establish a natural system if that's the case then I think you have to bite the bullet and burn during the regular season when you think this fire should occur and once you get the far is back to a reasonably good condition then perhaps you can just let it go and let it be a natural system again I think there's a possibility that that could still exist here in eastern Oregon again I'm just not that familiar with this part of the country clearly in Florida that's not a situation that can happen anymore but if you don't have a very well-defined then you really wind up probably doing more damage than good in the long run and if you were to bring in the botanists and the mycologists with their micro-risal associations and the zoologists and the forestry people you get all of their heads together as best that can be accomplished and I think you would at least be able to define the specific goals and then once you have your goal it's much easier to know exactly how to attack the problem it isn't clear in my mind that the goal has really been defined exactly what folks want to accomplish here yet but again I'm an outsider that isn't necessarily a negative statement I don't mean it to be a negative statement but I think it's just sort of a reality state other questions yes what problems do you have with homo sapiens in regards to prescribed fire in Florida tremendous problems the area where we do our burning right across the street is a complex of about 6,000 condominiums and believe me they don't like our fires we are actually now when the university was built 30 years ago we were at the extreme edge in the outskirts of Tampa we are now in the city limits of Tampa so we have to get city, county and state and forestry permits and so on before we can do our burning and clearly one has to pay attention to the amount of smoke one's generating and the way the wind is blowing we try to take into all those kinds of things that's part of a prescribed burn is you again you really look at and weigh all of the variables if you know exactly what you want to accomplish so for example you don't want to put smoke over large numbers of people for large amounts of time for a lot of obvious reasons so one of the things you'd want to do is have your winds going in the proper direction and this is all part of the prescription it is it is becoming a science I can't say it really is a science yet but I think it is becoming a science there's enough people working on it now we're getting enough insight into how to do prescribed burning and looking at more and more variables and we have to take humans into consideration that's for sure I don't know if I answered your question now but we do pay attention to people for sure we absolutely must any more questions from any of the outreach locations for either Steve or Henry let's give them a round of applause for coming this far thank you very much