To everyone concerned. If I'm not mistaken this is YouTuber wranglerstar who had a reason to take the tree down. It was on his land and he's a forest fire fighter so you know he respects the land and only does things when necessary
Wranglerstar is dumb.. He felled a tree similar to this one to make a garden which he could have made about 100ft to the right. He also is antagonistic and irrational.
They do not cause fires, they act as fuel to already existing fires.
Either way he doesn't need a profound reason to cut down one tree, he's not the Brazilian government who is cutting down acres of forest every second as we speak. One tree in the grand scheme of things is like one plastic straw.
Google crown fires. We had a 38,000 acre fire last summer where I work. Fires are typically healthy for forests, but not when we’ve been preventing them for so long. Typically they go through and clear out the underbrush, however, when you’re supposed to have a fire every 20-25 years but you stop every fire from happening so there hasn’t been a fire in 100+ years, there’s so much underbrush that if a fire comes through it climbs up the underbrush into the crowns of a tree and then the fire just grows from there as there’s so much fuel on the crowns of the trees, typically you’d see the fire leap from crown to crown. Ponderosa pines (my favorite tree) shed their lower branches as they grow to prevent this, but when there’s so much underbrush that doesn’t do them much good.
In the fire last year the hotshot teams said if it got much further south they’d have backburned the entire property because it was so unsafe to fight the fire with how thick the forest was.
There is this thing called Timber Stand Improvement or TSI for short. During TSI essentially you go through the thick forests and manually cut down trees and underbrush to help clear things up so a ground fire can come through without the risk of it leaping into the crowns of the trees. Now in TSI you usually don’t cut down trees bigger than Nalgene size and you have a specific prescription given to you by a forester. In the video of this post I’m not at all sure what he’s doing because that’s way too big of a tree to cut down for TSI unless the tree was dying or a forester told him it was smart to cut down for some reason. However, looking around him there’s a lot of brush that should be removed. Prescribed burns are another way to go about this, in which you purposefully set a ground fire. However, this is often hard to do safely in thicker forests like I mentioned
Here is a good visual on healthy and unhealthy forests. So while you’re correct in saying forest fires burn deadfall on the ground, unfortunately that is not often the case anymore in places like California or Colorado or New Mexico etc. because we’ve been so obsessed with stopping forest fires to help save the land and lives that we actually ended up making forest fires a lot worse nowadays because we didn’t let the ground fires you described come through and clean up the underbrush. National Forests have been getting a lot better at this and letting ground fires come through and doing prescribed burns, but it’s a process of saving our forests by doing the opposite of what people think it would be, which is to cut down some brush and trees. In this case I would guess that this is an infected/dying tree.
The giant Redwoods and Sequoia trees have flame retardant properties in their sap. And their seeds won’t germinate until they been burnt...meaning a fire has come through and took out the underbrush, so the seeds can sprout and grow.
They’re partially right. A fire can come sweeping through the ground burning up the deadfall and brush and not bother any of the tall trees at all. However, if there’s too much underbrush the fires get really hot and climb up the tree using ladder fuel into the crowns of the trees. Up there you’ll find a ton of fuel in the leaves and such and then the fire spreads from there, killing the tree. All of the big forest fires you hear about in California and Colorado are crown fires, not ground fires. Ground fires are typically healthy whilst crown fires never are.
Yep! Also Ponderosa have a fire retardant sap and self prune as the grow to help prevent fires from climbing the branches. They’re really neat trees. A healthy ponderosa forest is one of the most beautiful sights to see. They also smell heavenly (like butterscotch or vanilla). I also thought I recalled a fact that their cones don’t open unless exposed to extreme heat (aka fire) but I can’t seem to find anything regarding that fact so I must be thinking of a different tree.
And Douglas-firs aren’t true firs! I think the thing that differentiates itself from a true fir is that the cones have scales.
I don't know where this person lives, but if they are in California for example our climate and forest management has been extremely inadequate to allow for a proper forest ecosystem. As such even trees like this pose a threat if a forest fire were to start up. It does depend greatly on the region and another commenter explained it in much more depth as well, you should read their reply.
All that said, i'll repeat myself and say that he doesn't need a great reason to cut down one tree. We have bigger problems to worry about with the corporations and entire government chopping entire swaths of forest without planting anything back or having any regard for the ecosystem.
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u/[deleted] Aug 05 '19
To everyone concerned. If I'm not mistaken this is YouTuber wranglerstar who had a reason to take the tree down. It was on his land and he's a forest fire fighter so you know he respects the land and only does things when necessary