A Review of Fire History in the Jemez Mountains, New Mexico
Parmenter RR . 2022. A Review of Fire History in the Jemez Mountains, New Mexico. National Park Service
The purpose of this report is to provide background information on fire history in the Jemez Mountains of northern New Mexico as part of the updated Fire Management Plan on Valles Caldera National Preserve. The following scientific studies and data sets, including historical photographs, are presented to support the proposition that fire has been a common natural phenomenon in the Jemez Mountains for millennia, and that the virtual elimination of fire in the late 19th Century via over-consumption of herbaceous vegetation (grasses and wildflowers) by sheep, cattle and horses – eliminating the fine fuels that would carry low-intensity forest-floor fires – and the deliberate suppression of fires by land management agencies in the 20th Century, has resulted in forest stand conditions that are unnatural and at high-risk of uncharacteristic high-severity stand-replacement fires. The evidence for patterns and trends of historical fires and changing fuel loads come from five sources: (1) Records of natural and human-caused fires in the Jemez Mountains; (2) pre-historic analyses of multi-century temporal patterns of fire scars and tree rings; (3) fire season pattern analyses of tree ring fire scars; (4) scientific journal articles based on fire research in the Jemez Mountains; and (5) historic photographs showing fuel load conditions in the Jemez Mountains.