At long last, the North Bay’s 2020 wildfire season has officially been declared over.
CAL FIRE’s Sonoma Lake Napa Unit transitioned out of peak fire season operations Monday thanks to recent rains and cooler temperatures.
Wildfires destroyed over 4.2 million acres in California this year, setting a modern day record.
But it was more than just the volume of fire that set the season apart.
“We’re also seeing an increase in the severity of those fires, so that’s the amount of vegetation that’s killed, as well as larger patches of those severe fires, so big patches where everything is killed,” said Tadashi Moody, senior environmental scientist with CAL FIRE.
That intense burning makes it harder for forests to bounce back, which could have long term consequences for the health of California's forests.
That is one of the reasons that Dr. Kate Wilkin, fire ecologist at San Jose State University, is calling for more prescribed burns before next year's fire season.
“California was meant to burn, historically, and it’s going to continue to burn. So we have to figure out a way to live sustainably with it… We don’t want to have fires that wake us up in the middle of the night, we want to say when and how a fire is going to occur. And by using prescribed fire, we can take control and have agency of how that’s going to work in our environment.”
This year, the state reached a deal with the federal government to reduce fire risk on over a million acres in part by using more controlled burns.