Because its delicate desert habitat did not evolve with major wildfires, the Joshua tree is especially vulnerable to flames. When they burn, they burn fast. And they rarely survive.
Hughson could feel the danger before it arrived. She was surveying the preserve last month, driving a gravel road into its New York Mountains. She looked warily around at the thick scrub, brush and grasses.“Man, this is going to burn,” she said to herself. “For me, it’s a sense of inevitability.”
But it is clear the land will not be the same. Joshua trees high mortality rates during fires, and scientists estimate the preserve’s pinyon-juniper woodlands, which are full of hardy evergreen plants that thrive in higher elevations and rocky soil, could take up to three centuries to return to something like their pre-fire state.a visit to the preserve this week. In Cedar Canyon, a remote area near the middle of the park, pinyon-juniper covers the north side.
Scenes like these will become more common as the climate warms, said Justin M. Valliere, a plant sciences professor at the University of California at Davis who has studied what is known as the invasive grass cycle. It goes like this: After fires, landscapes like the Mojave can become more vulnerable to invasive species, which then grow faster and promote more fires, continuing a positive feedback loop.
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