About this episode

Dr. Andrew Merschel discusses how tree ring research is reshaping our understanding of fire history in the Pacific Northwest.

For a long time, fire research in the moist forests of the Pacific Northwest was dominated by two main assertions: that wildfires in the West Cascades are typically "high-severity, low frequency" (in other words, dominated by stand-replacing fires that don't happen very often), and that Indigenous burning largely took place in prairies, river valleys and low-lying oak ecosystems. But extensive tree ring sampling over the last decade has shown that, in fact, these assertions aren't telling the entire story. Our guest for this episode is Dr. Andrew Merschel, who is a post-doc at Oregon State University and lead scientist/co-director of the Tree Ring Lab at OSU. Andrew has spent years studying fire histories in the moist, doug fir, hemlock and cedar-dominated forests of the West Cascades. His findings through the Tree Ring Lab have brought to question many of our longest-held assumptions about how fires burned in the Pacific Northwest prior to colonization—and the takeaway is that it's not nearly as simple as we once thought.

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