U.S. Forest Service ecologist Suzanne Gifford led a small group of hikers up Chandler Ridge in Addison County earlier this month to point out how fire has shaped one Vermont forest. The trail in the Green Mountain National Forest began in a dense, creekside stand of ash and maple — the kind of shady, humid woodland familiar to most Vermonters. But the forest changed as the group ascended the ridge. The maples thinned. The ground dried. Acorns and dead oak leaves crunched underfoot. By the time the hikers crested the ridge, southeast of Lake Dunmore, the forest was entirely different. Northern red oaks grew in gnarled clumps, separated by bright glades. They were short enough that a telephone pole would have popped through the canopy. The Adirondacks were visible between the trees, and sedge, wintergreen and blueberry gleamed in the spring sunlight. “It’s a unique part of the forest,” and an important one, Gifford said as she surveyed the oaks, which provide acorns that feed turkey and bear. Such dry, ridgetop oak woodlands are rare in Vermont — and they are dwindling. She pointed out how few oak saplings could be seen in the undergrowth, which was dominated instead by striped maple, beech and serviceberry. When the overstory dies, the open woodland would be replaced by a thicket of other hardwoods. Suzanne Gifford and Chris Mattrick Credit: Caleb Kenna What could prevent that is fire. This rocky ridge, where warm air blows up from the Champlain Valley “banana belt,” is one of Vermont’s fire-adapted landscapes. Studies have found that the Chandler Ridge forest burned roughly every 20 years between 1800 and 1900, leaving fire scars and lumps of charcoal in the soil. The seeds of oak, hickory, pitch pine and red pine germinated in the bare soil left behind. Flames consumed the water-loving species, and the oaks grew into a sunny woodland. “These curly leaves invite fire,” Gifford said, picking up an oak leaf. “They would happily burn given the opportunity.” Unlike most other trees on the ridge, the old oaks would weather the fire. The United States was once dotted with landscapes shaped by fire’s cycle of death and regrowth. Counterintuitively, a little fire can make the forest more resistant to big ones by clearing out leaf litter and brush. Americans started suppressing wildland blazes a century ago, intending to protect the nation’s forests. Instead, that approach altered and even endangered some of them. Now Gifford and her peers at the Green Mountain National Forest are drafting an ecological restoration plan to bring fire back to four woodlands along this ridgeline. The Northern Escarpment Project would set a series of blazes along the ridgeline beginning in spring 2027, continuing every three years for the next 15. The plan, which the Forest Service intends to finalize by late summer, would add about 1,000 acres to the 3,200 already burned in Vermont and aims to renew the oak woodlands for the diverse plants and animals that depend on it. Still, the proposal has attracted criticism. Neighbors are concerned that fire could spread or harm streams. The nonprofit Standing Trees, which advocates for the restoration of old-growth ecosystems in New England, has been particularly vocal. Zack Porter, the executive director, was skeptical that new oak trees would grow after prescribed fire, based on the results of another burn in southern Vermont, and he criticized plans to use herbicide in some instances. A stream on the Leicester Hollow Trail Credit: Caleb Kenna The Forest Service, for its part, has acknowledged that prescribed fire alone may not be sufficient to renew the woodlands on top of the Northern Escarpment — red pines regenerate after high-severity fires, which aren’t part of this plan, and deer eat young oak trees. In response to public opposition, they removed herbicide from the project plan. “That’s really good,” Porter said. “That means they are listening to some of the concerns they’re hearing.” Porter said he doesn’t oppose all prescribed fire, but that public input should have come earlier and “the project is out of proportion [with] what would be a wise experiment.” Large-scale prescribed fires are rare in New England, even as they’ve become more common nationally. Tribal nations from Oregon to North Carolina are reviving traditional burning practices, while across the West, firefighting agencies set prescribed blazes to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires. Foresters joke that Vermont has an “asbestos forest” — it’s too wet to catch fire. Some scientists say that efforts to bring prescribed fire to the North Woods are misplaced and interfere with the reemergence of old-growth forests. But even in the asbestos forest there are pockets where fire used to be common. Most of the low-lying, historically fire-prone landscapes in Vermont occurred on the sand plains of the Champlain Valley — places that became Burlington’s New North End and Colchester. Sonya Kaufman, who leads the Nature Conservancy’s prescribed fire team in the Northeast, points to fire-scarred pitch pines in the Sunny Hollow Natural Area, just up the hill from Costco in Colchester, as one example. Leicester Hollow Trail Credit: Caleb Kenna “We’ve destroyed a lot of the fire-adapted ecosystems that used to be here,” Kaufman said. That has created this sense that “fire doesn’t belong in Vermont.” Other Vermont forest managers would like to scale up their use of prescribed burns in the remaining patches. The Vermont Department of Forest, Parks and Recreation burned 30 acres of Sand Bar State Park this spring, and the Vermont Army National Guard has for years set fires on its Camp Johnson base in Colchester. As in the Champlain Valley, the glades of Chandler Ridge are disproportionately important to the biodiversity of Vermont. “We have a lot of northern hardwood forest,” Chris Mattrick, Middlebury and Rochester district ranger for the Green Mountain National Forest, said while standing on Chandler Ridge. “We have a very small amount of oak.” Foresters have seen moose droppings on Chandler Ridge. Insects shelter in thick oak bark and feed on the wildflowers that bloom on the sun-dappled floor. Bats, cuckoos and hermit thrush follow. “Each of these communities is supporting a different suite of species, right down to the soil microbes and invertebrates,” said Bob Zaino, a state natural communities ecologist. “Maintaining that full expression is a key part of climate resilience for nature.” A secondary benefit to its plan, the Forest Service said, is that it will help the region weather wildfires. A beech leaf Credit: Caleb Kenna “We do get fires in Vermont,” said Ryan Hughes, the national forest’s fire management officer and a 25-year wildland firefighter. “I think it’s easy for people to forget that.” The state dodged a bullet in last fall’s drought. Western firefighting crews came to Vermont on standby, along with a “sky crane” that could suck water from ponds for airdrops. This spring, during a stretch of fire danger “about as high as you would ever see in New England,” Hughes said, a fire in Ripton ran up a hillside, burning 50 acres. Forest Service models suggest that this part of Addison County has some of the highest wildfire risk in the state. All the farmhouses tucked into the Green Mountain National Forest create a major wildland-urban interface. “I mean, it’s Vermont, so the danger is significantly less than out West,” Hughes said. But the future looks a lot like the past two years. Although Vermont will probably see more overall rainfall as the planet warms, it will be feast and famine: longer, hotter droughts and more torrential rains. The fire-loving forest in places such as Chandler Ridge won’t keel over in a drought like the encroaching thicket might. “We have an opportunity to be proactive here, versus out West where they’re already in crisis,” Hughes said. On a cold morning in April, the sort of fire planned for Chandler Ridge was on display at a lower elevation not far away, in the Goshen Blueberry Management Area. The hillside, covered in an ankle-high red heath of lowbush blueberries, is where the Green Mountain National Forest’s fire program began. “It was probably cleared for pasture back in the day, and when they let the pasture go, blueberries started to take hold,” Mattrick said. To sustain the popular blueberry-picking site, in 1973 foresters began burning every four years to keep the encroaching maple forest at bay. Three firefighters in yellow fireproof jackets and red helmets walked in a row along the uphill edge of a blueberry patch. Each one carried a red pail shaped like a watering can with a curlicue neck. When overturned, these drip torches dribble burning fuel. As the firefighters advanced, furrows of fire followed them. Prescribed fires take months, or often years, to plan. There is a literal prescription, a 30-page document describing the burn’s goals (here: blueberries), the weather for a burn, the fire lines that will be cleared. The crew had even scraped mini fire lines to protect individual trees. The conditions that allow a prescribed fire are narrow: before leaf-out in the spring, but only when fire danger isn’t too high. Hughes estimated that there are only 15 days a year when the weather cooperates, and this spring, there was enough of a window for the Forest Service to burn about 750 acres. Firefighters setting a controlled burn in Goshen Credit: Philip Kiefer On this day, the fire moved as a single wave into the scrub, crawling downhill and against the wind. Where flames, barely knee-high, passed through last winter’s yellow grass and flared up, they left behind the spring growth, as green as a soccer field. Hughes pointed out birch, beech and maple saplings wandering into the blueberries from the surrounding forest. Eventually, they’d shade out the berries. The goal is to kill the saplings. For the blueberries, though, the fire is no more harmful than a heavy pruning. They’ll spend the next two springs recovering before putting out a flush of new fruit in 2028. But fire is surprisingly temperamental, and, as Hughes watched, the wave of fire sputtered into little smoldering patches under a cold wind. The crew snuffed out the burn — better, he said, to wait for improved conditions than go ahead with a half-fire. This fire was as much for public recreation as for wildlife. On Chandler Ridge, the focus will be on sustaining an ecosystem. And that gets at the heart of the disagreement over the plan. The Northern Escarpment Project is one example of “forest engineering,” according to Standing Tree’s Porter: “You’re fighting what that place wants to do right now.” The project’s proponents, meanwhile, say some woodlands exist only because they’re always being disturbed. If maintaining them is important to Vermont, the gentlest way to give them a shake might be with fire. ➆ The original print version of this article was headlined “Burning Question | Federal officials are drafting an ecological restoration plan to bring prescribed fires to an Addison County forest” The post Prescribed Burning Proposed for Addison County Forest appeared first on Seven Days. ...read more read less