Twenty years after the Mount Vision fire burned thousands of acres in the Point Reyes National Seashore, Bishop pines—which rely on fire to regenerate—once again cover the landscape. But many of those trees are infected with the pine pitch canker fungus. As dead branches and trees accumulate, so does the potential for catastrophic wildfire.
“It is creating a significant fuel load that is very untypical of our coastal climate,” said Jordan Reeser, the fire management officer for Bay Area national parks including the Point Reyes National Seashore, the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and Pinnacles National Park.
“The fuel that exists there now has the potential for fire behavior much more intense than fire behavior during the Mt. Vision fire,” he said.
He said it is unlikely that steps could be taken to reduce the fuel load in the forest as the region is difficult to access by foot and machinery, Mr. Reeser said.
Prescribed burns to reduce fuels are used sparingly in the park because of a mixture of funding constraints and air quality concerns. Only about 180 acres are treated with prescribed burns each year.
Instead the park’s strategy is to focus on improving evacuation routes, Mr. Reeser said. Reducing fuel loads around the Bay View Fire Road and Limantour Road will enhance the ability for people to get out and fire crews to get in during a fire. Last month his team also started to help homeowners near the Inverness Ridge area create defensible spaces around their homes, which reduces the chance of homes and private property being burned.
Fire agencies with the county, state and federal government are also working on an update to the Marin Community Wildfire Protection Plan, which was created in 2005. Fire officials will talk about wildfire science and call for community input on local projects at public meetings throughout the county this month, including one at the seashore’s Red Barn on Oct. 13.
Pine pitch canker first appeared in California in 1986, on Monterey pines in Santa Cruz. It has since been found in 18 counties, and reached the bishop pine on the Point Reyes peninsula in 2007. The disease causes localized infections on branches, roots and trunks, causing the needles on branches to turn brown. Multiple infections can kill a tree.
Since 2011, Tom Gordon, a professor at the University of California, Davis, has been monitoring 16 plots within the area burned during the Vision fire. “Every year up to this point, we’ve seen an increase in incidence and severity of disease,” he said.
The trees in the area burned by the fire are probably more susceptible to disease, and more likely to die from it, because they are younger and smaller. Yet it is possible for infected trees to recover and develop some resistance, Dr. Gordon said. He surmised a Bishop pine forest could become less susceptible after 20 or 30 years of carrying the disease.
But he added that drought, a stress on the trees, could make it more difficult for them to recover.