Joshua Trees Were Devastated By The Mojave Fire, But There Could Be Hope

Over the past few weeks, the York Fire has blown through the Mojave National Preserve, charring Joshua trees, yuccas and all sorts of other native plants, growing to more than 93,000 acres in size.

The fire’s just about contained following a big burst of rain, but there’s still a lot of work to be done.

A Burned Area Emergency Response Team (BAER) is currently making its way through the preserve and documenting the damage, paying particular attention to plants, the watershed, roads and culverts, and historic mining structures. It’s with this information that the preserve will be able to request funding for fixes.

Will the Joshua trees recover?

As we wrote last week, Joshua trees and the ecosystems in which they exist can take hundreds of years to reestablish after a fire. Plenty of native plants burned in this one, according to Debra Hughson, deputy superintendent of the preserve.

That said, there’s some good news.

Across much of the area, the fire burned at low and moderate severity, meaning even if the tops of the trees burned, it’s possible their roots survived and they may be able to resprout — something that was observed across the 2019 Dome Fire burn area.

“If we go into another extended drought, then probably they won’t recover. If we get a nice set of wet winters, they’ll probably do pretty well,” said Hughson.

They’ll also have to survive persistent attacks by rabbits and other small mammals, who love to come along and munch on the delicious young shoots that pop up.

“There will not be dense Joshua trees like there were. Are the resprouts going to be sufficient to start the population again? That’s going to be a really big question,” said Todd Esque, research ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

Yuccas burn during the York Fire in the Mojave National Preserve on July 30, 2023.

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David Swanson

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AFP via Getty Images

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The threat to desert wildflowers

Another big question about the recovery of the area is — what sorts of other native plants will make a comeback?

For instance, wildflowers like the desert popcorn, desert dandelion, and lupin resprout from seeds that their predecessors drop annually.

Though those seeds can potentially survive decades before sprouting, fire could have killed off a whole lot of them, leaving an opening in the landscape for invasive species like red brome to move in and establish dominance. That’s a big concern, given invasive plants are in part responsible for driving these worsening desert fires.

Researchers such as Esque may go out to study the seedbank in an effort to anticipate what’ll happen to the area going forward.

But there’s at least one more piece of good news: The desert tortoise habitat was spared.

Yuccas burn during the York Fire in the Mojave National Preserve on July 30, 2023.

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David Swanson

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AFP via Getty Images

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Recovery timeline

Recovery will continue, likely with both deliberate plantings and weed abatement over the next three years or so.

Over the long-term, though, the path to recovery is much less clear.

“The actual trajectory of this landscape is decades or hundreds of years in the making. That’s going to be strongly influenced by where the climate goes in terms of temperature and rainfall,” said Hughson.

Persistent fires mean we’re going to continue to lose ecosystems that can take a couple hundred years to come back, and the area that these native plants thrive in will continue to shrink due to climate change.

That leaves the sobering possibility that the landscapes we’ve long come to love will never look the same again.