Subject(s): Lodgepole Pine
Title: Too Hot To Handle
Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow from the Mount Washington Observatory and this is The Weather Notebook. The Yellowstone Fires in 1988 burned millions of trees over 800,000 acres. Like weather and climate, forest fires are a part of the forest ecosystem. Nowhere is this link more noticeable than with the Lodgepole Pine tree. 10 years after the fire, Roy Rankin, a Park Service biologist at Yellowstone showed me how the Lodgepole pine needs fire for survival.
Roy: "Lodgepole pine produces two kinds of cones. The first takes about 2 years to mature and when the cone is mature seeds fall out and that is the more typical reproductive mechanism of pines."
Another reproductive mechanism unique to the Lodgepole involves a special kind of pine cone.
RR: "When it gets mature, it doesn't open up and as the tree continues to grow, these pine cones are retained up in the crown of the tree. What these cones need is a heat source to open up and it needs heat that's in the range of 112-120 degrees F. Once that cone opens up, the seeds that are in that cone are available then to repopulate a burned area."
And repopulate they do. The spiny, charred Lodgepole pines of Yellowstone are now surround with a 5 foot deep green carpet of offspring. The Lodgepole pine reacts to fire this way, just like in many other ways it reacts to the rain, the wind, and the sun.
For more information, visit our website at weathernotebook.org. Our show is funded by Subaru and the National Science Foundation.