Sydney Glassman

So, which is our most trees die.

So a lot of trees will die.

It produces a ton of ash.

A lot of nutrients are released.

You have a higher pH, a ton of nutrients.

The wood is now turned into pyrogenic organic matter or charcoal.

And then the upper layer of soil with all the bacteria and fungi is mostly dead.

However, there are microbes that are in deeper layers in the soil that can move up and, or there are things that like have spores or like resistant propagules that could survive high temperatures that might have survived.

And then there's things that basically were not there before the fire, but are able to bloom after the fire in absence of the competitors and other things that were there before.

So there's this bloom of microbes that do really well after fires.

This has actually been known about for over 100 years.

There was a paper in 1909 that described these fireplace fungi.

And they're these orange cups that can sometimes make like a carpet of fungi across the soil.

Like it can all be carpeted in these orange cup fungi if you have a really hot fire.

Okay, and so this stuff just waits underground waiting for a fire.

I always thought forest fire bad.

Smokey the forest bear trying to prevent us from forest fires or whatever Smokey did.

Hope he wasn't smoking.

That's bad for your health.

But it turns out fires are not only completely natural, they kind of need to happen for our ecosystems to be balanced.