...stands near Noonmark are the result of unanticipated vegetation succession that I have monitored since fires scorched the area in 1999. To better understand patterns of postfire forest reestablishment, I sought to answer these questions: When would trees return to the site, and what tree species would establish after the fire? Would the seedlings be shade-intolerant pioneers such as paper birch, which covers many of the slopes that burned in the early twentieth century? Would the species colonize the site one at a time, or would several species establish soon after the fire? If the latter, would early- and late-successional species coexist on the recently burned mountainside?

This opportunity to study postfire succession in the High Peaks was unusual because forest fires in northern New York and New England reportedly have been infrequent (Fahey and Reiners 1981; McMartin 1994; Lorimer and White 2003; Pederson and others 2004). Charles Cogbill's analysis of land surveys from 1796 to 1825 indicated that fire may have burned a given area in the western Adirondacks only once every thousand years or so before Europeans settled the region (Cogbill, unpublished data; see Ziegler 2004). The detailed 1817 lotting survey of the Roaring Brook Tract near Noonmark Mountain documented recent fires on about 5 percent of the land (Cogbill 2005). This observation may suggest that fires have burned more frequently in the eastern Adirondacks than on the western side of the park, or it may simply be a historical accident that several fires burned shortly before a land inventory in 1817. The survey record provides us with a picture of the former forest and signs of disturbance only at a single snapshot in time.

Authors of several recent scientific articles and popular books have documented how native peoples transformed some of the American landscape. The steep peaks of the Adirondacks may be an example of a region in the eastern United States where people had little effect on the environment until the nineteenth century, just as some places in the West were minimally altered by people before European explorers and settlers arrived (Vale 2002). Native Americans did not permanently settle the mountainous regions of upstate New York, and people apparently did not profoundly alter vegetation over large areas until the mid- to late 1800s (Williams 1989; Whitney 1994; Schneider 1997; Bonnicksen 2000). The Adirondack Mountains "stayed largely empty of people ... for the same reason they were later bypassed by white settlers; it was much more practical for humans and other large mammals to make their homes in the surrounding lowlands" (Schneider 1997, 16). Peter Kalm, the Swedish botanist who traveled throughout eastern North America circa 1750, described that wilderness as "waste regions" where "no Indian villages are found" (Kalm [1770] 1964, 589). Native Americans may have ignited some fires as they passed through the spruce-fir forests in search of game (Bonnicksen 2000, 288). To date, however, no one has published a fire history of the eastern Adirondacks reconstructed from charcoal deposits in soils and lakes, which would provide valuable insights into the spatial extent of fires over time.

If people did not ignite many fires in the forests before the nineteenth century, what about natural fires? Lightning strikes in the Adirondacks are rare, at less than one flash per square kilometer per year (NOAA-NWS 2006). The Adirondack forests "are not especially prone to fire" (Leopold, Reschke, and Smith 1988, 181) and have been called "asbestos forests" because of the humid climate and the low flammability of the plant material (McMartin 1994, 186; Ketchledge 1996). Naturally started fires have been uncommon. Under certain conditions, however, these fire-resistant forests can burn.

One-third of the Adirondack forests had been cut over or consumed by fire by the end of the logging boom in 1910 (McMartin 1994; Jenkins 2004). Fires burned discarded branches and trees (slash) on about 344,000 hectares in northern New York between 1903 and 1913 (Pinchot 1912; Howard 1914; Ketchledge 1992b; Jenkins 2004). Today less than 10 percent of the Adirondack forest is old growth, as a result of forest clearing, logging-related fires, windstorms, insect outbreaks, and decline in forest health (Leopold, Reschke, and Smith 1988; McMartin 1994; Jenkins 2004). Vast expanses of forest have grown up after loggers removed timber and fires burned the slash in the early 1900s. The younger forests that cloak the mountain slopes differ from nearby old-growth forests in species composition and structure (Ziegler 2000, 2004). Eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadensis), for instance, is rare in second-growth forests near hemlock-dominated old growth. Postfire, second-growth forests are denser and have more small-diameter trees than do stands with 350-year-old trees.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Edwin Ketchledge explained that plant succession usually follows a predictable pattern in the High Peaks region of the Adirondack after people or fires disturb the mountain forests (1992b, 1996). Postfire tree reestablishment at elevations of 760-1,200 meters above sea level typically begins when mountain paper birch (Betula papyrifera var. cordifolia, a variety of paper birch that has heart-shaped leaves) germinates at a burned site (Whitney 1994; Ketchledge 1996). Slower-growing red spruce (Picea rubens) and balsam fir (Abies balsamea) develop in the understory and eventually overtop and replace shade-intolerant birch, whose seeds germinate best on bare mineral soil with sufficient sunlight (Safford, Bjorkbom, and Zasada 1990). The spruce-dominated forest may persist at the site...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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