![]() ![]() “In those desert areas, the mountains are like sky islands, they call them,” she said - they rise from the “sea” of the hot desert floor that surrounds them and host dramatically different populations of plants and animals. The New York Mountains in the Mojave National Preserve have an enormous density of rare plants, including blue blossom, manzanita and uncommon chaparral shrubs, that could be devastated by fire, she said. On top of that, more humans traveling into desert areas increases the risk of sparks - from a bullet glancing off a rock while someone is target shooting or a chain dragging on the pavement while someone is hauling a trailer, she said. ![]() Some models suggest that increased global temperatures as a result of climate change are bringing more rain to the Mojave desert, fueling grass growth and the risk of lightning strikes, Cunningham said. But at lower elevations, the rains helped more grasses grow, and then several weeks of high temperatures caused the vegetation to dry out - or cure - priming it to become wildfire fuel. “Big fires in the desert are entirely consistent with the fire season outlook for 2023,” Swain wrote, noting that poses a major concern for ecologists and desert conservationists.įire regimes tend to vary on a gradient from climate-limited, in which there is an abundance of fuel but conditions are often too wet to carry fire, to fuel-limited, in which the climate is generally conducive to fire but there is usually not enough vegetation to carry it.įor this reason, forecasters had called for a less active fire season in California’s higher-elevation forests, which are dense but remain moist from the wet winter. Given an exceptionally wet winter and cool spring, larger fires in sparsely vegetated areas that are typically "fuel limited" should be expected due to the extra vegetation growth such conditions foster. It all comes down to antecedent climate conditions.
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