Air Date: Week of November 28, 2025

In July 2025, a field crew brings electrofishers to Oregon’s Cook Creek. The crew is counting fish and other aquatic life for later scientific analysis of how the stream’s ecosystem has recovered in the years since Oregon’s Labor Day wildfires of 2020. (Photo: Evan Rodriguez, OPB)

In 2020 Oregon faced its most destructive wildfire disaster, when more than a million acres burned in the “Labor Day” fires. The sheer size and severity of those fires gave scientists a unique chance to learn what happens after a massive burn. Jes Burns of OPB reports on the surprising resilience of fish and amphibians five years after the fires.

Transcript

O’NEILL: It’s Living on Earth, I’m Aynsley O’Neill.

DOERING: And I’m Jenni Doering.

In 2020 Oregon faced its most destructive wildfire disaster, when more than a million acres burned in the “Labor Day” fires. After the firefighters finally headed home, it was the scientists’ turn to head out into the woods. The sheer size and severity of those fires gave them a unique chance to learn what happens after a massive burn. Science Reporter Jes Burns of OPB has the story.

BURNS: Sometimes, to understand what’s happening in a stream, scientists have to go fishing.

LEER: I'm ready whenever – fire in the hole.

[SFX AMBI Beep/AMBI Beep and Splash]

BURNS: Field crew leader David Leer is knee-deep in remote and rocky Cedar Creek east of Salem.

LEER: Fishy, fishy. Oh, I saw one.

BURNS: The forest around the stream burned in the 2020 Beachie Creek Fire – one of the Labor Day Fires.

[SFX AMBI Beep/AMBI Beep and Splash]

BURNS: The beeps come from his bulky hard-plastic backpack. He waves a metal probe in the water in front of him.

LEER: If you can hear the beeping, you put your hand in the water, you're probably gonna get a little jolt.

BURNS: This is electrofishing.

SWARTZ: Electrofishing is temporarily stunning the fish in the water and then snatching them up as fast as you can in the net. You know, we look like a Ghostbuster.

BURNS: Allison Swartz is an Oregon State University stream ecologist.

SWARTZ: The fish are doing their best to hide from us.

LEER: There’s a fish 3 o’clock, I think.

SWARTZ: Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep

LEER: Nice. There it is right there.

SWARTZ: I think that was a rainbow trout.

BURNS: All the fish, tadpoles, crayfish and giant salamanders they catch will be counted, weighed and measured before being released back into the stream. The data are helping the team understand how streams changed following the Labor Day Fires. US Forest Service biologist Brooke Penaluna.

PENALUNA: So this study is unique in that we have 30 streams, you know, across 3 big mega fires in Western Oregon.

BURNS: The streams they’re studying are diverse. The Labor Day Fires burned around them at different severities. And the forests they’re in have been managed in a variety of ways – there’s tree plantations, more natural mixed aged forests, areas where the burned trees were salvage logged after the fire, and some unburned streams for comparison, says Swartz.

SWARTZ: The reality is that wildfires are increasing on the landscape in severity and size, and so in terms of understanding how we manage our forests and these ecosystems, we need to know what's happening because we're really just kind of at the start of what we're going to begin to see in the future.

LEER: Ok, get ready. This is going to get exciting.

BURNS: Every summer since the fires, crews have tested water quality and how the animals in the streams have fared.

LEER: Fish in your net. Out of your net. Going down. That was brutal. It jumped right in your net, then jumped out. Then gone.

BURNS: Many of the species depend on clean, cold water to flourish. But much of what’s left around Cedar Creek are trees like charred matchsticks. Without the canopy, the sun beats down on the water much of the day. Yet Swartz has started seeing some surprising trends.

SWARTZ: Despite stream temperatures getting really warm in these systems after the fire, the fish populations are remaining just as high or higher than the unburned sites.

BURNS: The researchers are still unpacking exactly why. One theory is that more sun means more algae, which feeds the food web. Also without trees and vegetation sucking up the water on stream banks, there’s more left for the rivers, says Penaluna.

PENALUNA: With the extra rains that are coming straight down and into the stream - with that runoff - you're getting additional fringe habitats along the streams.

BURNS: And it’s not just fish. Preliminary results are showing that the wildfires haven’t caused declines in amphibians either. But the researchers have seen fewer frogs in places where heavy post-fire salvage logging happened. For the longest time, stream ecosystems were thought to suffer because of wildfire. But in the five years since the Labor Day Fires, these scientists are seeing signs that the trout and other species that call the Cascades home are thriving.

PENALUNA: Essentially everything we thought we knew about fire, we've kind of turned it on its head here on the west side of Oregon.

BURNS: And the research shows that the tragedy of the Labor Day Fires has turned into an opportunity. A chance to figure out the best way to manage our forests after wildfire to protect our streams and all the life they contain.

LEER: Yup, it’s right here. Right here. That’s a different fish.

DOERING: That story comes to us from Jes Burns of OPB, Oregon Public Broadcasting.

 

Links

This story at the Oregon Public Broadcasting website.