Park plan raises
controlled fires

The fire-management plan
also proposes grazing and hunting

HILO » A new plan for Hawaii Volcanoes National Park calls for reducing the threat of wildfires by allowing cattle to control pasture grasses and using the hunting of mouflon sheep to foster growth of koa trees, which create a wetter climate, says park naturalist Tim Tunison.

Send comments The environmental assessment of the draft fire plan for Hawaii Volcanoes National Park can be read at www.nps.gov /havo/manage/fire/ eafire_tableofcontents.htm and can also be found at public libraries. The period for public comment extends to Dec. 19. Comments can be sent to Fire Management Plan EA, P.O. Box 52, Hawaii National Park, HI 96718.

In a change from the past, the draft fire management plan would allow some fires to burn unchecked and would include deliberate burns in some areas to promote native vegetation.

Overall, the draft plan is similar to the park's plan in place since 1990, which calls for putting out most fires.

The park consists of 333,000 acres, which includes the new 116,000-acre Kahuku addition. When acquisition of Kahuku was under consideration, possible fires on 8,000 acres of potentially vacant pasture land were a concern.

In response, the park has an agreement to allow former landowner Damon Estate to continue ranching for five years to manage the pastures, Tunison said. Eventually the pastures will be converted to native forest, but the process hasn't been worked out yet.

In general, the area gets 110 inches of rain per year, so it is not a high fire-hazard area.

An example of how native forest can re-establish itself is nearby, where illegal koa logging was done before the park acquired Kahuku.

New fencing on the park's Kona side keeps mouflon sheep from coming in from lower elevations, Tunison said. Hunting has reduced the number of sheep in the area, he said.

With no sheep eating koa seedlings, young koa has sprung up knee-high in about a year at the rate of about 1,000 per acre. As those seedlings mature into trees, they will encourage a wetter climate in the area, reducing fire hazard.

Fire-prone, non-native plants in the older part of the park have increased the number of wildfires there threefold and the size of fires 60-fold since the 1960s, an environmental assessment for the new fire plan says.

The new plan calls for letting such fires burn if they are in remote areas, unlikely to spread and threaten no endangered plants.

Since 1993, the park has studied the effects of experimental controlled burns of up to 100 acres, Tunison said. Some burns in the coastal area were beneficial, eliminating non-native grasses, permitting native pili grass and other native plants to return.

The new plan envisions more such burns, perhaps up to 200 acres at a time, now designated as "management" burns rather than "experimental."