2023_07_18 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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important voice, I think, in guiding our management out there. And so, in 2006 Puuanahulu was \[unclear\] over to us and so now we have the Puuwaawaa was turned into a forest reserve and Puuanahulu was a game management area. Next slide. Just an important note, I guess, so while that area was primarily used for grazing and cattle grazing for 150 years and because of that natural, that native dry land forest was destroyed on many levels, not completely but quite a bit – even though that happened we still have 15 rare plants and one rare moth that exist in the area and that we are so – and because of that some of our main objectives are built around protecting those species and, yeah, protecting them, OK, next slide. So now we get into the fire part of it a little bit. So, this is just a slide that shows kind of a very common cycle, fire cycle based around grasses. So more so the grasses and so and this we see happening at Puuwaawaa. So many grasses are not native. So as they’re introduced for cattle grazing and for other reasons they begin to establish and as a fire might come through the system – the grasses dry out faster and they can carry that fire from just the grassland into the forest with the higher intensity than might have naturally occurred before the grasses were there and so as that forest slowly or quickly – it can happen both - as it burns and, there begins to be re-establishment of vegetation in the area – generally those grasses can re-establish themselves much more quickly than the forest can and because of that – as they dry out through a season someday, again, if there’s fire they can – it just becomes kind of like an endless cycle that increases in capacity and in impact over time to a point where you have no forest left and so that’s kind of just a brief overview and the next slide. That’s just a picture of a pretty good fire out at Puuanahulu, and so you see just mostly grass there. That’s probably what already grass but before that historically there used to be a dry forest there and it’s no longer. Next slide. So, talk about the case study. Just kinda driving all of that home – so in the mid-80s, 1985 – the Natural Area Reserves proposed a NARS in a patch of forest that was like Highway 190 – the mauka road between Kona and Waimea - transected right through this patch of kauila and lama. Next slide just to – we have some before and after so it was a kauila/lama forest and shortly after that proposal was submitted there was some devastating fires that went through and you have – so we’re – the next three slides are just gonna be pictures of what the forest looked like and what it’s like today after those fires, so there was – so next slide is probably a little bit better but we had some, oh, somebody says they had – is that Leomana has wood from that forest – interesting. So next slide, this is just – that’s what the forest looked like – that’s what it looks like now. Next slide, and so I guess that’s just – it’s kinda just some images to show that that other slide about that cycle is, you know, we’re not just making stuff up – we see these things happening on the ground – so talking about literature review – it’s this research, this project out there by Blackmar and Vitousek in 2000 –I’ll just read what they – kinda the general gist of what their project concluded. So even as grazing caused a gradual – so – sorry I’ll take one step back – I apologize – we’ve had grazing out there for so long which did cause destruction to the forest, but not all of it and this is where you kinda get your Catch-22 – your 2 way sword where you have all these non-native grasses and this destruction from these non-native ungulates on the forest – but what it has been – what remains is a large swath of non-native, fire loving vegetation and so we’re gonna, I guess, get briefly into the best way to control the fire-loving vegetation, um, is those animals that kinda caused the destruction of the forest to begin with, so Blackmar and Vitousek said even as grazing causes gradual declines in forest cover, however, it protects forests from rapid loss – the destructive fires – by reducing the ability of grass fuels to carry fire. Grazing in drier areas reduces the risk of fire, not only by controlling the accumulation of fuels but also by controlling the spread of more flammable grass species, and they weren’t and now in there specifically talking about fountain grass and so at Puuwaawaa there’s the mauka section of that area has a mix of fountain grass but other grasses like Kikuyu, whereas the makai section of that area is pretty much only 6