Following the recent fires in the Palisades, Altadena and other locations across Los Angeles, many concerns have arisen over how to properly care for the environment and public health. Many experts and environmental groups are focused on a lesser-known long-term issue: how to properly manage the chaparral ecosystem.

What is chaparral?

Chaparral is an ecosystem comprised of many different plants, such as manzanitas, ceanothus and chamise, according to Richard Halsey, director of the California Chaparral Institute. Chaparral is characterized by its resilience to fire and is accustomed to a Mediterranean climate of hot, dry summers and mild, wet winters. According to the US Forest Service, chaparral is California’s most extensive ecosystem, covering more than one-twentieth of its land. Halsey said chaparral is an essential part of Southern California, and he worries many fire management plans are extreme in their focus on plant removal.

“You look at all the literature and listen to all the rhetoric and all the laws, it’s all about one thing and one thing alone: defensible space. Homes don’t burn by flame contact, for the most part, from plants. They ignite from embers that are burning, that are coming from fires a mile away, and they get in the attic, and they land on the stack of wood,” Halsey said. “If you go out and clear the vegetation like everyone’s calling for, you instantly guarantee non-native weeds, which are more flammable and more readily ignitable than anything chaparral can produce. So you’re not solving the problem.”

In addition to plant removal, Stephanie Liu, TreePeople‘s Mountain Forestry Associate Program Manager, said people need to be mindful that chaparral has a different relationship to fire than other ecosystems.

“This type of ecosystem is meant to burn,” Liu said. “It’s adapted to fire … but it’s adapted to low frequency fire. So the understood historical frequency of fire in chaparral is every 30 to 150 years. I think it can lead to a misconception … you think, ‘Okay, it’s great if it burns every time,’ but if it burns at a frequency higher than every 30 years, then it’s not great.”

Controlled burning

While chaparral is more fire resistant than other plants, it has evolved so that it burns to the ground every time it ignites, a type of burning referred to as a crown fire. Such fires are devastating in California’s forests, which are used to smaller understory fires. As fire management strategies of controlled burns have become more popular in recent years, Liu said people need to be mindful of how chaparral burns differently from other ecosystems.

“Historically … [at] any government run land since Smokey the Bear came around, they’ve been suppressing fires completely … and so over the years, the fuels, the plants, the understory grew and grew and grew and were never reduced by fire because it kept getting stopped,” Liu said. “And then here we are now — and there are fires starting that we can’t stop because they’re so big and crazy, because there’s so much fuel built up over the years. The fires in sequoia were burning giant sequoias and killing them, which is not supposed to happen — because there was so much fuel built up that the fires were getting huge and burning more of the tree than it could handle … That’s not natural. That’s not what’s supposed to happen. And so there’s a shift from the fire suppression to ‘Maybe we should be doing controlled burns’ … but that is not a story of chaparral.”

Fire management and controlled burning are ongoing processes. Los Angeles County Fire Department Deputy Forester Daniel Sanchez wrote in an email that the county is looking to bring back prescribed burn programs and good burning techniques, but did not specify in what areas. Chaparral is essential not just to the landscape of California, Sanchez wrote, but also for its animal community.

“Chaparral ecosystem in Southern California is a very important in the unique biodiversity of Southern California,” Sanchez wrote. “This habitat hosts many different plant species but also is habitat to many animals, including pollinating insects.”

According to Sanchez, California’s chaparral is also an important ecosystem for many species of birds who use it as part of the Pacific Flyway. A UC Berkeley study found that mechanical shrub removal was more harmful to chaparral bird communities than burning.

Liu and Halsey both said there is much disagreement over how to properly manage and maintain chaparral ecosystems. One of the prominent dangers of chaparral burning at a frequency higher than every 30 years is the risk of type conversion, Liu said.

“A lot of [chaparral plants] have seeds that will survive the fire, and then even can be prompted to germinate by fire — so most of these plants have a way to come back … that’s a great thing,” Liu said. “But if we let it burn again in the next 30 years, under 30 years, then that’s when we see what we call type conversion, and that’s turning one type of ecosystem into another type of ecosystem. So right now, with fire, that might look like a chaparral turning into an invasive grassland. It’s just full of invasive species like mustard or oat or there’s a lot of invasive grasses … so that’s what we don’t want, and that could be the long-term environmental consequence.”

Fire management

Chaparral is sometimes blamed for the worst parts of fires, Halsey said, which he thinks is often the result of ignorance or misinformation. He said some people accuse chemicals on chaparral for aiding landslides after fires, when chaparral’s presence actually has the opposite affect.

“There’s landslides and mud flows and whatnot after a fire because there’s no chaparral to cover the soil to allow the water to percolate slowly,” Halsey said.

Halsey said many fire-management efforts in Southern California are currently focused on stopping fires, which will ultimately be unsuccessful as chaparral naturally burns hot. Since California frequently has the conditions to start fires, Halsey said organizations should be focused on what they can control, such as fireproofing community structures.

“We don’t try to control earthquakes, right? We don’t have an agency called CalQuake that runs around tries to stop earthquakes because we know we can’t. So we retrofit our communities to survive them,” Halsey said. “That’s how we need to approach wildfire. We just make our communities fire safe and, you know, let nature alone and stop trying to control it because it doesn’t, in the long run, ever work and can make it worse.”

In the aftermath of Los Angeles’s recent fires, Liu said she hopes more people will take the time to learn about environmental issues impacting them, including chaparral.

“I’ve heard a lot of chatter about climate change in the wake of the fires, which I think is good because it’s happening right now… it’s not just this nebulous thing that might happen in fifty years or one hundred years,” Liu said. “But I think there’s a lot of focus on the impact on people … I am a little bit afraid that people will vilify the landscape we have — the chaparral. Because it is something that burns and it burns hot, it burns really hot. But that’s part of the ecosystem model. Chaparral is supposed to burn all the way to the ground. That’s just how it works.”

This story was originally published on The Oracle on March 16, 2025.