Back to Life: Yellowstone Park Begins Its Renewal --- Research Biologist Despain Roots Around in the Ash, Finds Reasons for Cheer
Wearing a bright yellow flame-retardant shirt, Donald Despain crouches down to study the ash-covered forest floor. The scorched hillside around him appears utterly lifeless.  Almost everything in sight is black, from the tips of trees 40 feet above the ground to the powdered ash blanketing the earth. The firestorm that raged through here in recent weeks was driven by 60-mile-an-hour winds that fanned temperatures to more than 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit. The fire was so intense that a gray shadow on the forest floor is all that remains of a fallen log.  Where many people recoil at the sweep of nature's destructive power, the 47-year-old Mr. Despain marvels at the tiny steps life is already taking to renew itself. As Yellowstone National Park's research biologist, he has already begun to monitor the forest's rebirth from the worst fire on record.  His eyes red from the blowing ash, Mr. Despain patiently counts the quarter-inch lodgepole pine seed "wings" within a rectangular frame he places on the hillside. The tiny seeds are slowly released from rock-hard pine cones only after the cones have been seared by the passing flames; indeed, they require a fire to propagate themselves. The little wings act like the rotary blades of a helicopter in dispersing the seeds.  "This is amazing," says Mr. Despain, reflecting on his count. "This works out to one million seeds an acre." Only about 500 mature trees were on an acre of hillside here before the fire. Of course, not all the seeds will become trees. Deer mice will eat some of them. Others won't take root. But next spring many of the seeds, fertilized by nutrients leaching into the soil from the snow-packed ash, will sprout, along with a bouquet of grasses, flowers and shrubs, as burnt areas of the park erupt with life.  The profusion of pine seeds is just one of the rejuvenating forces at work in Yellowstone even as the fires, largely quenched this week by rain and snow, still smolder. Grasses and several types of wildflowers, ranging from fireweed to wild geraniums, are already sprouting less than seven weeks after fire roared past Grant Village near Yellowstone Lake. Next year, the ground cover replacing the park's burnt stands of aging lodgepole pines should provide a 30-fold increase in plant species. More edible plants, in turn, support larger, and more various populations of birds and other animals.  "We see what's going on here not as devastation and destruction, but, rather, rebirth and renewal of these ecosystems," says John Varley, Yellowstone's chief of research and Mr. Despain's boss.  Mr. Despain's research should play a major role in a new debate over whether to reforest burnt areas of Yellowstone or to let nature take its course. In recent years, environmentalists have for the most part succeeded in promoting the natural processes of the parks. But the approach is again under attack. The National Park Service has already been at the center of a much-publicized political firestorm over its 16-year-old "natural burn" policy, which allows lightning-caused fires to burn themselves out, except where they threaten towns or park buildings.  Critics, including elected officials from Western states and the logging and tourist industries, have grabbed headlines by blaming that policy for fueling the inferno that this summer raged over half of Yellowstone's 2.2 million acres and cost more than $100 million to fight and clean up.  Reforestation would give wooded areas in Yellowstone a "five-year jump" on natural regrowth of the woods and would "get it green again," says John Davis, Willamette Industries Inc.'s general manager for Western timber logging operations in Lewiston, Idaho. Gerald M. Freeman, the president and chief operating officer of Stone Forest Industries Inc., agrees: "Controlled burning, selective logging and reforestation are a much better way to manage the forests."  The pressure to bring back Yellowstone's forest through reforestation may get intense. In an average year, 2.5 million tourists visit the huge park, and a drop-off because of the fire damage could severely hurt business. In August, with fires out of control, the tourist trade was off 30% here.  The emotional appeal of replanting the parks already has led to some reforestation proposals -- some of them a bit off the wall. New Jersey's governor, Thomas Kean, for instance, announced that his state planned to donate thousands of evergreen seedlings to replant Yellowstone, apparently without realizing that none of the proffered species are indigenous to the park. Although the offer was later amended to include native varieties, the park service politely declined.  Mr. Despain hopes that the scientific evidence that park researchers are gathering will testify to the forest's ability to renew itself, while countering emotional calls for human help. "When I hear the word 're-vegetation,' my blood runs cold," he says.  Mr. Despain joined the park's research department in 1971 after finishing his doctorate at the University of Alberta on the plants of the Bighorn Mountains in northern Wyoming. He worked under Glen Cole, the park's head of research from 1968 to 1976 and a leading advocate of letting natural processes prevail in the park. Alston Chase, an author and park critic, describes Mr. Despain as one of the park's "most orthodox believers" in the official natural management policy.  Mr. Despain has set up or is planning several long-term research projects to study the effects of this year's fires. In addition to his seed-counting, Mr. Despain has created nine "before and after" study plots to gauge effects of the fire.  Within these 15-by-25-meter plots, he and other researchers cataloged the size and the number of lodgepole pines, as well as the variety of plant growth on the forest floor. (He had to abandon one such study area two weeks ago. Fire licked at its corners even as he was mapping the trees within.) After the fire is out, he surveys damage to a plot. Next spring he will chronicle rebirth.  Some of the impulse to reforest Yellowstone may be based on a misapprehension of just how much damage has been done here. Television pictures of the Yellowstone's fires at their height made things look worse than they are. True, fire boundaries within the park cover about half the park's acreage. Yet only 10% to 15% of land within these boundaries was scorched by raging crown fires that burn everything in sight, Mr. Varley estimates.  In fact, nearly half the area within the fire zones remains untouched by fire.
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