By Maya Khosla

My colleague Tonja Chi and I are entering a forest two years after fire. Our work is part of a series of surveys directed by Dr. Chad Hanson to search through forests that rapidly recover after wildfire. The trees towering all around us had been engulfed in the flames of the 2013 Rim Fire, which burned massive areas of Yosemite and Stanislaus National Forests.

The tallest trees are pines and firs. Some have been blackened from their base to eye-level; others higher. Yet the forest floor is packed with conifer saplings, mosses, blazes of saffron-petaled wallflowers, mushroom heads standing like bright beads. It is a veritable carpet. Splashes of white blooms the size of small faces adorn the dogwoods. Rapid regeneration is at work everywhere. Dark, flaky remains of fallen trees are crumbling into soil. Fire brought the forest’s own fertilizers back to earth. It was an agent of rejuvenation.