NJ Pine Barrens can recover from a wildfire

I have found it sad to see a large area of my beloved NJ Pine Barrens burned, see for example this awesome NJ Advance Media article By Stephen Stirling with interactive satellite imagery before and after the Spring Hill Fire burned 11,600 acres last weekend; I need to warn you that you will have at least temporarily disable your ad blocker in order to see the article. However I can personally attest to seeing the Pine Barrens come back fairly quickly after a wildfire, this is the point of this article.

You may be interested in this short video report from NJ Network taken in 2008, a year after the 2007 Warren Grove Fire burned over 17,000 acres in the NJ Pine Barrens. You will see how the area burned had begun to regrow a year after the fire went through.


Direct link to video report from NJ Network

There is a good article from the NY Times published on September 25, 2018 (with photos) discussing how an area burned by a 860 acre in the NJ Pine Barrens in May 2018 had begun to regenerate by September. For those of you who are interested in the fire adapted ecosystem of the NJ Pine Barrens I found some information two evergreen trees that are commonly found in the NJ Pine Barrens and how they have adapted and even depend on fire to reproduce, the pitch pine and the shortleaf pine, and the Pinelands Alliance has a good fire ecology page (be warned that one of the videos  and the slide show requires the flash video plug-in which some of you may not want to use for security concerns).

I live a couple of hours away from the NJ Pine Barrens, I try to get down there at least once or twice a year. I usually drive by an area burned by the Warren Grove Fire a mile or south of the ignition point. I pull off in the pull off and take photos if I have my camera with me. The first three photos were taken in August 2008, about 15 months after the Warren Grove Fire. Note that you can see the cones on the dwarf pitch pines (aka pymgy pines) that only open after a fire. In the last picture you can still see evidence of the fire but of note is the growth that happened in the 15 months after the Warren Grove Fire.

Photo taken August 2008 at Stafford Forge (Rte 539 South), Warren Grove NJ 

Photo taken August 2008 at Stafford Forge (Rte 539 South), Warren Grove NJ 

Photo taken August 2008 at Stafford Forge (Rte 539 South), Warren Grove NJ 

In the following photo, taken at the same spot three years after the Warren Grove Fire, you can see the difference. You would hardly know that the area was burned in a wildfire three years prior.

Photo taken May 2010 at Stafford Forge (Rte 539 South), Warren Grove NJ