11/12/23

By Aditi Jha

A few months ago, a wildfire in Hawaii leveled a town and killed around a hundred people. A recent wildfire in the remote Hawaii rainforest of Mililani Mauka destroyed irreplaceable native forestland home to over two dozen fragile species. It was noticed burning inside the Oahu Forest National Wildlife Refuge, home to 22 endangered species, including iiwi and elepaio birds, a type of tree snail (pupu kani oe) and the Hawaiian hoary bat (opeapea), on October 30th and was mostly contained by November 10th. Officials are currently investigating 20 miles north of Honolulu. It burned 1681 acres in the Koolau mountains, a region that is typically wet due to trapping moisture and rain from the northeast. Sam 'Ohu Gon III, senior scientist and cultural adviser at The Nature Conservancy in Hawaii told ABC News, "Now we’re seeing fires in the wet section of the island that normally doesn’t see any fires at all.” These fires are being caused by severe drought, a product of climate change that even affects wet regions like Koolau. Hawaii's ecosystems are delicate and small; easy to destroy with even a limited fire. A rare tree gardenia was completely wiped away by a 2016 wildfire in the Waianae mountains. InciWeb, a national incident information system, explains that "Hawai‘i’s ecosystems are not fire-adapted and are not resilient to fires. Native plants and wildlife do not easily recover from fires, so it’s important to prevent fires from affecting native ecosystems," also continuing to add that "invasive species are one of the most significant threats to our endangered and threatened species. Invasive plant species are more resilient to fire and can more quickly invade and become established in recently burned areas—displacing native and endemic plant species." The fear of other plants replacing the original ones is warranted. Uluhe ferns, koa trees and ohia trees in an Oahu forest that were burned away in a 2015 wildfire were replaced by dry, fire-prone invasive grasses. Those grasses were part of the reason why Lahaina experienced such extreme wildfires in August. A burned area response team has arrived in the area of the wildfire to evaluate the impacts and plan out how to restore the damaged forest. Crews on Thursday completed water drops in the southeast and western edges of the fire, and tried to find residual heat. Since almost all of the wildfires in Hawaii are human-caused, Gon hopes that people will work on prevention practices, like implementing buffer zones of less-flammable plants to stop invasive species and wildfires from spreading.

That's the news for today! Stay safe!