Dozens of acres of standing charcoal !?

Good day,

I'm looking for project case studies of using burn-killed timber for soil improvement in forest regeneration, reforestation, agro-forestry, orchard horticulture.  

I've started working a site burned over by the Hermit Peak Calf Canyon wildfire, New Mexico's largest ever, in 2022.  The rest was lightly & beneficially burned but 70ac of ponderosa thicket on a level mesa top at 7700' were 100% killed, are starting to keel over & snap in wind, dangerous enough people don't want to go up there, there's some post-fire aerial seeded & weeded + light meadow cover, the fences remain down & cattle wander through.  It's very difficult to near impossible to get heavy equipment up there.  

My proposal is to clear the boundary lines, get the fences back up, in contrast to the extensive grasing outside manage it as an intensive rotation grass bank.  Within that exclose ½ with a wildlife fence to keep out deer/ elk/ rabbit/ bear to compare that regeneration.  Within that plant a seed tree repository of the best genetics most valuable native species.  Within that replicate as a dryland planting the 600-variety collection of high- & dry-land adapted fruit/ nut/ berry we're propagating into the river valley below.  

I'd like to try various side-by-side treatments of the burned trees to soil surface across these different zones.  Thanks for any references & referrals.

Hi Patrik. What a wonderful challenge!

I am not in possession of the case studies you are looking for. Perhaps others can chime in.

What I can give you is a few unofficial, unscientific observations from controlled burns in Jasper National Park, Canada. It does not seem the trees that remain upright are standing charcoal. Rather, they have some unfinished charcoal on the outside and a lot of torrified wood. They remain standing for a remarkably long time, suggesting to me that they resist fungal and insect decomposers.

The massively destructive 2024 wildfire in Jasper offers new options for observation. I'm hoping to look more closely at this in the fall.