Even before a wildfire is fully contained, recovery begins. At this point, I am not getting into the complexities of post-fire recovery on federal v state lands, size of the fire, and severity of the damage. Here I am considering seeding fire damaged lands following a wildfire, seeding using helicopters. As I understand it, seeding is important, especially in moderate to severe soil damage from the fire, to stabilize the soil and to seed the landscape so that plant germination takes place. I expect that aerial reseeding will be occurring over many of the areas burned out west in this devastating fire season.
Thanks to Mike Archer's Wildfire News of the Day email for November 30th, I learned of a November 29th article from the Lewiston Tribune reporting on aerial reseeding of some of the areas burned by the Evans Canyon Fire which burned 75,817 acres near Naches in Yakima County,Washington. This is a good article, I hope that you take a few moments to read it. They say in part about this aerial reseeding:
Helicopters and crews are reseeding land burned by the Evans Canyon Fire this summer between Naches and Ellensburg, the start of what will be a long recovery. … The wildlife department hired contractors to complete 300 of 750 scheduled acres of seeding with a helicopter in forested draws around Cleman Mountain and Black Canyon.
Those native mixes will replenish riparian areas susceptible to erosion, as well as some shrub-steppe landscapes. Confer Morris said seeding around the Wenas and Umtanum creeks would focus primarily on native grass species and sterile triticale.
I do not have videos of this particular aerial reseeding, but I do have a couple of videos that I will share to give you an idea of how helicopters do aerial reseeding. Smaller helicopters with mechanisms for buckets have a small metal bucket that holds the seed that is then dropping over an area designated for reseeding. In the first video, you will see a helicopter being loaded for seeding and then taking off.
direct link to video on Youtube
In the second video, you will see the helicopter (it is small) flying with the seeding bucket and then dropping at about 50 seconds.
2 comments:
Really interesting the was they do this. I was checking out an article about drone seeding, one should check it out. I was division on a fire in CA this year and on night shift, the drone usage is paramount to our operations and there is so much more capability that some people just need to know more about. Thanks for sharing.
WFM Assistant, thanks for your comment. Just after I posted this article, I read about DroneSeed in Bill Gabbert's Fire Aviation Site on December 6th. He reported on a company known as DroneSeed that has FAA approval to use drones in the following states: Arizona, Where DroneSeed's heavy lift drones may be use for post-fire seeding. This is very interesting.
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