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My third blog post comes with a bit of a delay, fortunate I did take notes on the last day of observations, as well as taking photographs of the evidence of the bog fire from last year.
Before proceeding, I’d like to direct the reader’s attention to an article from last year that reported on this fire, and it’s location. I would like to do this in order to provide verification of the bog fire, the time and location at which occured.
Year in review: Bog fire burned: Richmond’s wildfire was one of the biggest blazes in local history.
From the article:
“The summer of 2018 was one of the hottest ever recorded in B.C. and Friday, July 27 is a day that will live long in the memory of Richmond’s fire department.
Early morning reports of smoke coming out of the peat woodland at the DND Lands, near Westminster Highway and Shell Road, quickly developed into a wildfire.” (Campbell, 2018).
I’ve also been trying to determine how to demonstrate to the readers, here, that the burnt over areas I plan on sampling in did indeed experience that same fire a year ago. It occurred to me that in response to their canopies being destroyed by the fire, many of the invasive blueberry, Vaccinium corymbosum, would probably have begun to re-sprout this year. The new vegetative growth, if it was only from this years growth, should not have had time to lignify, so if I observe an abundance of such growth (all green, with no lignified, woody tissues present) then this should be a demonstrable indicator of a fire having occurred within the area of observation in the season prior(summer 2018) to this year’s growing season (2019).
So I returned to the bog at the DND Lands on October 14th, 2019, and made some observations. According to the time stamp in my photos, the time was 5:35pm. Through out the areas that still had residual suit and char, many V. corymbosum plants, who’s canopies had been destroyed, but who’s crowns had not been damaged, showed obvious signs of vigorous greens growth, little to none of which had lignified, or only had very little newly lignified tissue at the bases of the new stems. I also took photographs of this growth, to show that there could only have been a single season’s growth since the last fire, and that fire must have occurred in the areas I will be making my observations.
In the fifth picture I photographed the branch to be sampled while still attached to the original plant. According to my notes, the branch sampled had 42 nodes. If you can see the foot long ruler under the burnt blueberry bush, you’ll see that the branch is about three times longer than the ruler, so the branch had grown roughly a meter in one growing season. This may seem like a lot of growth, but many species of plants exhibit this response to having their canopy’s destroyed, especially ericacasious plants. In both the fifth, sixth, and seventh photos, we can see that the entire branch is composed of new, green tissues, and has virtually no lignified materials. Given the reports of fire in this area from last year (2018), the obvious evidence of recent fires in the immediate area (black suit, blackened peat, chard woody material, clearly visibly in all the photos) and the evidence of a single season’s worth of growth in the V. corymbosum plants, we can conclude with relative confidence that there was a bog fire in the summer of 2018 within the DND Lands, and, more importantly, in the areas where I will be observing plant fire responses.
