In 1988, ecologist Monica Turner found herself on the shores of Yellowstone Lake as the forest burned. She happened to be in the national park to collaborate with fellow ecologist Bill Romme to study historical fires with computer modeling. When the enormous new conflagration took off — coughing smoke into the air, into their eyes and lungs, and creating its own weather patterns — the researchers knew it would be significant. That fall, they returned to the park, and Turner got her first aerial view of the aftermath. She could see that the fire’s damage had not been contiguous, but rather a mosaic of burned and unburned areas. Turner has never looked away.
A total of just over 1,240 square miles would burn that year — more than a third of the park — and although news reports at the time marked Yellowstone as destroyed, that hasn’t been the case. In the 30 years since, Turner, now at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has amassed a considerable amount of data and scores of papers.
What she and her colleagues have found was surprising at first. Many of the burned areas renewed from within through serotinous cones, which require heat to melt their resin coatings and release their seeds. Perennial grasses and wildflowers sprouted the first year after the fires and flowered profusely the second year. Aspen trees, which typically regenerate from asexual root suckering, began to regrow as seedlings — something researchers had never seen in that area before.
