Prescribed Fire in Sierra Nevada Forests: Is Biomass for Energy a Better Alternative?.

Decades of ill-advised fire suppression have resulted in an unprecedented buildup of fuels in forests of the Sierra Nevada Mountains that are contributing, along with climate warming, to an increased incidence of catastrophic wildfire. Efforts to mitigate the problem are past due, but are now underway and include mechanical biomass removal, prescribed fire or both. Both harvesting and fire cause nutrient removals, but by different mechanisms (direct removal in biomass versus volatilization) which affect various nutrients in different ways. In this paper, we review field studies in the Sierra Nevada mountains of Nevada and California where nutrient budgets with biomass removal and fire have been compared, and we discuss the pros and cons of each method in terms of long-term carbon and nutrient budgets.