Olympic National Park's old growth rain forest trees are falling as Paradise fire destroys vulnerable rotting heart and butt wood

[Emily]

[h=1]Burning rain forest raises concern about future[/h] Originally published July 5, 2015 at 6:19 pm Updated July 6, 2015 at 11:10 am By Hal Bernton
Seattle Times staff reporter

PARADISE CREEK, Olympic National Park ? Fire crews call them ?cat faces,? deep holes that flames have burned into the trunks of the centuries-old Sitka spruce and hemlock growing here in the Queets River valley.
The trees may smolder for days ? spouting smoke from their bases before finally toppling to the ground with a thunderous crash that sounds like a bomb has gone off.
?They are falling down regularly,? said Dave Felsen, a firefighter from Klamath Falls, Ore. ?You can hear cracking and you try to move, but it?s so thick in there that there is no escape route if something is coming at you.?
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For those who fight wildfires, this large rain-forest burn is a rare spectacle, and an intriguing laboratory for what they might be facing more often in the future.
?Few people in our profession have ever seen this kind of fire in this kind of ecosystem,? said Bill Hahnenberg, the incident commander, in a morning briefing to crews. ?The information you gather could be really valuable.?...

http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle...ning-rain-forest-raises-concern-about-future/

There is a raw video at the link with an amazing shot of a firefighter hanging off what almost appears to be a vertical cliff at first, but it is the root system of a fallen old-growth tree. An interview with firefighter David Felson reveals that the fires start at the base burning out rotten areas in the middle and this is what makes the trees susceptible to falling.

I'm wondering if the number of trees with rot is unexpected and due to an increase in fungal diseases. There is a study below you can access the full text on that shows the link between rot and fungal infection:

http://digitalcommons.usu.edu/barkbeetles/165/

Maser, C. and Trappe, J. (1984). Seen and unseen world of the fallen tree. USDA Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Forest and Range Experiment Station, General Technical Report PNW-164, 56 pp.
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The earliest use of a newly recruited tree is likely to be by heart rot or butt rot fungi and associated micro-organisms that inhabited it before..
it fell.

But so far I haven't found a study on historical distribution of rot in standing old growth trees in wild rain forests of the PNW.