As the country braces for another epic wildfire season, a debate is raging among U.S. Forest Service (USFS) scientists, private timber managers, and climate ecologists. Forestry practices have long been guided by what’s known as the “plantation” model. For generations the USFS and state officials have used plantation techniques when reseeding terrain after wildfires. As climate change and decades of fire suppression encourage more frequent and severe wildfires, arguments about the wisdom of plantation forestry are coming to a boil. Mountain communities have a vested interest in this fight.

Plantation practices dictate seeding only a single species, in a grid pattern, like rows of corn. The spatial pattern of trees is highly correlated to fire susceptibility. Research demonstrates that plantation forests are less healthy and less effective at resisting fire.

The American Southwest has been experiencing severe regional droughts for 20 years, accompanied by increasing average temperatures. Last year Colorado experienced its three largest recorded fires (Cameron Peak, East Troublesome, and Pine Gulch). The East Troublesome fire burned late into October and crossed the barren Continental Divide well above the tree line.

Those fires didn’t just feel extreme. Paleoecologist Phillip Higuera studies how and why ecosystems changed in the past. Higuera and two co-authors published research in June showing that the frequency and extent of the 2020 fires was unlike anything experienced in the last 2,000 years.

Using sediment cores from 20 lakes in the Rocky Mountains, Higuera’s team identified and dated charcoal debris in order to statistically plot the frequency and intensity of fires. Over the past 2,000 years, fires burned subalpine forest stands in the central Rockies every 230 years. In the 21st century, that frequency has nearly doubled, with a fire now expected to burn any given spot every 117 years.

Plantation forestry is used all over the world to optimize economic returns. Stands of a single species planted in a uniform grid do maximize the adolescent growth rate of trees and enable more efficient harvesting. Plantations of non-native species are now grown worldwide, and many are admittedly more productive than harvesting stands of native timber. Although they represent less than 5% of the total forested area worldwide, tree plantations account for 35% of global wood products.

A 2016 study by eminent forest ecologist J.R. Boyle and illuminated the biological consequences of plantation techniques. Single species forests are more susceptible to disease than mixed species forests. Where plantations displace natural forests, the legacy mycorrhizal networks in the soil are destroyed, reducing nutrient sharing among the trees. Such monocultures also drastically reduce the diversity of insects, birds, and mammals cohabitating in the forest, degrading adjacent ecosystems. And finally, grid planting makes plantation forests more prone to severe fires.

That last point should be of great concern to wild land communities. It begs the question: why do the USFS and other state forestry agencies plant in a grid when reseeding forests? California, where 4.2 million acres of forest burned in 2020, has been studying that question.

In his $2 billion wildfire mitigation budget, California Governor Gavin Newsom allocated $100 million to forest health, and empowered a committee to codify best practices for forest restoration. A growing cadre of scientists argues that those guidelines should include clustered reseeding.

In 2020, ecologists including Malcolm North of the USFS studied satellite imagery from more than 1,000 California wildfires between 1984 and 2018. They discovered that spottier, varied vegetation and tree patterns are correlated to greater fire resistance. Organic clustering works by breaking up the tree canopy, as well as the shrubs and other fuel on the ground. If a blaze rolls through, patches of the forest burn, but other parts are left intact.

Clustering is precisely what the USFS is hoping to achieve with the ongoing Forsythe II Project in the Roosevelt National Forest, albeit through cutting rather than seeding. One of the project’s primary goals is to “emulate natural disturbance in lodgepole pine-dominated stands to mimic variable structural and spatial patterns across the landscape in order to increase resistance and resiliency.”

The science is becoming clear, but clustered seeding defies decades of USFS tradition and faces resistance. An unlikely voice of opposition comes from climate activists, some of whom claim it could slow the carbon sequestration uptake of reclaimed forests. Of course, the improved fire resistance of those same reclaimed forests means they would benefit carbon mitigation efforts by not burning as frequently as they mature.

The virtue of organically distributed forest seeding is clear; the political consensus to adopt it remains in doubt. If you live in a wildland community, you should care how the USFS and state reseed public lands. Clustered seeding can build more resilient forests, even if it doesn’t provide the rapid growth and density that historical policies favored.