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🔥 How do coastal wetlands recover after wildfire?

You walk a St. Marks dike the morning after fire and learn the creeks are still full. Follow surface burns, peat holes, green overshoot, and the water that decides recovery.

5
lessons
~20 min
to learn
🔬 Science
subject
Adults
level
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What you’ll learn

  1. Water decides what burnsExplain how water level splits a coastal-wetland fire into a surface burn plants can survive or a peat fire that consumes the ground.The same mapped fire can be a haircut or an excavation. Water is the switch.
  2. Green is not the old marshUse the St. Marks Juncus record to separate first green shoots from a mature marsh canopy.NDVI can overshoot an unburned marsh long before the canopy is itself again.
  3. When peat burns, the ground is goneShow that a peat fire removes elevation and carbon that rewetting cannot instantly replace.At Great Dismal Swamp, 47 cm of peat left as carbon. Wetter soil can slow the next fire. It does not pour the old peat back.
  4. Measure more than colorSeparate what a green pixel can support from what needs elevation, fuel, animals, and a reference site.Eastern scars fade fast. Storms move NDVI. Color is not a census and not a soil core.
  5. Fix the water, then watchApply EPA restoration principles: diagnose hydrology, prefer passive recovery when it can work, monitor, and revise.Match the treatment to the limiting process, then keep the plots open long enough to see which clock you are on.

Questions this course answers

Why can two places inside one wetland burn perimeter recover differently?

USGS tracks recovery rates that differ within a scar and among habitats. Standing water, wet peat, and dry edges are not the same fire.

Put a peat-threatening fire in order.

Dry peat can smolder. Lost soil is lost elevation, and the plant community can change with it.

What did Ramsey's Landsat record show after Juncus burns at St. Marks?

Mean NDVI rose about 300 to 400 days, overshot, then declined toward a mature value around 900 to 1,000 days. Recovery can take up to three years.

Match the St. Marks phase with what it describes.

Ramsey used time-since-burn and nearby unburned sites so a green pixel would not be mistaken for a finished marsh.

What did USGS LiDAR measure at the 2011 Lateral West Fire?

Reddy and colleagues calculated an average 47 cm of peat consumed and about 1.10 teragrams of carbon released.

Why can rewetting help but not instantly restore burned peat?

USFWS raised water 0.5 to 1 ft in treated areas. USGS elevation tables have not shown peat accreting again; subsidence has slowed.

Grounded in trusted sources

  • U.S. Geological Survey, Wetland Fire Remote Sensing Research: The Greater Everglades Example, Fact Sheet 2012-3133, https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2012/3133/pdf/fs2012-3133.pdf
  • Ramsey, E.W., III, Sapkota, S.K., Barnes, F.G., and Nelson, G.A., 2002, Monitoring the recovery of Juncus roemerianus marsh burns with the normalized difference vegetation index and Landsat Thematic Mapper data, Wetlands Ecology and Management 10: 85–96, https://www.usgs.gov/publications/monitoring-recovery-juncus-roemerianus-marsh-burns-normalized-difference-vegetation
  • Reddy, A.D., Hawbaker, T.J., Wurster, F., Zhu, Z., Ward, S., Newcomb, D., and Murray, R., 2015, Quantifying soil carbon loss and uncertainty from a peatland wildfire using multi-temporal LiDAR, Remote Sensing of Environment 170: 306–316, https://www.usgs.gov/publications/quantifying-soil-carbon-loss-and-uncertainty-a-peatland-wildfire-using-multi-temporal
  • U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Nature-Based Solutions: Hydrologic Restoration of Peat Soils on Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, https://www.fws.gov/project/nature-based-solutions-hydrologic-restoration-peat-soils
  • National Park Service, Everglades National Park, Geology (peat, fire, and dry-season burns), https://www.nps.gov/ever/learn/nature/evergeology.htm
  • National Park Service, Everglades Fire Crews Receive Assistance from South Florida Water Management District, 22 April 2020, https://www.nps.gov/ever/learn/news/everglades-fire-crews-receive-assistance-from-south-florida-water-management-district.htm
  • U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Principles of Wetland Restoration, https://www.epa.gov/wetlands/principles-wetland-restoration

Every Wunder lesson is built from real, reputable sources — never invented.

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