1 minute, 2 seconds

Dr. Andrea Lloyd says:

And people know pretty well from lower elevation forests that fire has a positive effect on spruce. That is removes competition, it gets rid of all this organic stuff that builds up on top of the soil, and it leaves this really wonderfully favorable seed bed so after a fire spruce start regenerating fairly rapidly. But people don't really know what effect fire has right at treeline and we can come up with a bunch of different things that fire might do. Fire might do the same things it does at lower elevations, which is remove all the organic stuff, and you can see looking at the-- at these burned sites that there's less organic stuff, there's less vegetation, and so it might make a more favorable place for regeneration. On the other hand, by removing vegetation, fire might make these sites more exposed, it might make seeds more limiting, and so it could potentially slow down regeneration right at treeline. And this experiment will get-- get us part of an answer as to what fire does at treeline by tellings us how it is that seedlings grow when they're put in burned places versus unburned places.