This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2005, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Utah State University researcher Charles Kay is a wildlife ecologist who likes to take pictures. Lots of pictures. Thousands of pictures.
And like many artists, Kay has a specialty. In his case, it's landscapes: distant vistas that capture meadows, ridgelines and rock formations.
But for every photo he snaps, Kay also collects another. It has to be taken from an identical location, or as close to identical as possible, as the one he shot. And it has to be very old.
How old? Early 20th century or even older is ideal. But shots from the 1920s, '30s and '40s will do. Even photos from the early '60s will sometimes suffice.
It is through these before-and-after photograph sets that Kay and others are able to assess long-term changes to the environment. Kay has been doing this work for some time - in Canada, along the Great Divide on the Idaho-Montana border and the northern Great Plains. But for the last four years, he has been shooting and finding historic companion photos taken in the Fishlake and Dixie National Forests of southern Utah. The findings have been alternately encouraging and alarming.
"Everybody talks about how things used to be, but people usually don't have much data to back it up," says Kay, who works for USU's Extension Services in the political science department, specializing in environmental politics. "Well, this is some of that data. You can see it for yourself."
Kay's photography work in southern Utah started as an assignment to measure the long-term effects of livestock grazing on forest lands. But in the course of the research, new trends revealed themselves.
The good news, according to the researchers: Utah's southern rangelands are in considerably better shape than 100 years ago, owing to increased management and better grazing techniques.
The bad news: A century of fire suppression has led not only to a buildup of fire fuels, but a reduction in the amount of wildlife habitat and riparian areas. Without regular fires to wipe the slate, "woody" vegetation such as sagebrush, pinyon juniper and conifer have crowded out grasslands and aspen stands - reducing, in the process, habitat that wildlife and even livestock can thrive in.
"Basically, the conifers are crowding out the aspens," says Chad Reid, a USU extension services agricultural agent. "Out of 355 photo pairs, there are zero photos where the conifers have decreased, 8 percent where they've remained about the same and 92 percent where they've increased. That's a concern, whether you're a cattleman or a sportsman. There's nothing to eat."
A visit to their Web site - http://www.extension.usu .edu/rra, also linked on http://www.sltrib.com - will confirm those findings, researchers say. In many photo sets, what were grassy fields in 1916 have been overtaken by sagebrush in 1999. Even famous photos document the change. The 1877 picture of Mountain Meadow Massacre ringleader John D. Lee sitting on his casket, waiting to be executed, shows a relatively barren hillside in the background, says Reid. Current photos reveal a slope overtaken by pinyon juniper.
Almost all of this woody growth, the researchers say, can be attributed to a lack of fire. By contrast, fires prior to the 20th century burned often. Many began via lightning strikes. But Kay and others maintain that a sizeable number of other fires were set by Native Americans who used the blazes to create more fertile ground for crops.
"These folks had a pretty sophisticated way of managing the environment," he says. "They were fires of high frequency, but low intensity. Lightning strikes alone wouldn't account for as many fires as there were."
The problem now, he adds, is that fire fuels have built up to the point where small-scale, low-intensity burns are impossible.
"According to Forest Service data, Utah used to contain 2.5 million acres of aspen; we're now down to less than 1 million and it's still declining," says Kay. "Aspen used to have a very high fire frequency. To maintain that, you'd need to burn 50,000 acres a year. The Forest Service doesn't come close to that now."
The Forest Service, which is slowly shifting its emphasis from fire suppression to fire management - controlled burns and clearing out undergrowth, for example - have found Kay's work to be valuable in terms of assessing vegetative trends in the forest and assessing fuel buildup.
"It has been really important in terms of our long-term monitoring," says Mark Madsen, a botanist with the Dixie National Forest. "It's helped us figure out where we've been and where we're going. It's given us a historical perspective we didn't really have before."
Kay and others say the photo research has left them much more optimistic about southern Utah's rangelands, which were ravaged by overgrazing, and a complete absence of grazing regulations, a century ago. But through what they call steadily improving management techniques by the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management and ranchers, they maintain that the equation has been turned around.
"It's real interesting," says Reid. "One of the things you always hear is that the rangelands are overgrazed, in bad shape. In fact, they're in better shape than they've been for a long time. The riparian areas are in better shape, and the soil erosion has decreased."
Kay says he knows that opinion is not shared universally. He's heard the criticism: that they've used their photos selectively - meaning the best shots - to back up their claims.
"I'm not saying there aren't livestock management problems. I've gone out to Nevada and seen areas that I recommended ought to be closed," he says. "But it's not a cattle problem. It's a people problem. I'm not up on a soapbox here trying to change the world. I'm an educator whose job it is to inform the public, the folks who ultimately make the decisions."
The use of photo comparisons to document environmental changes is hardly new. But Kay's work does mark something of a first for the state - which is partially financing him through mineral leasing funds.
And the work is far from done. Researchers continue to seek old photos from private collections that may provide yet more clues about what's happened to southern Utah's ecosystem over the last century.
"In a lot of cases it confirms what we already knew," says Madsen, the Forest Service botanist.
"But what really helps is that through these repeat photos, we can help the public understand what's going on. It's not quantitative research, but it is qualitative. Charles Kay is really doing wonderful work. I wish I'd thought of it."