Volunteers help seedlings take root as New Mexico attempts to recover from historic wildfire

Associated Press

Volunteers spent a few hours scrambling across fire-ravaged mountainsides Saturday, planting hundreds of seedlings. The tiny trees are part of a monumental recovery effort in the wake of the largest wildfire in New Mexico’s recorded history. The 2022 blaze was spawned by a pair of botched prescribed burns that federal forest managers intended to use to lessen the threat of catastrophic fire in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Instead, large swaths of northern New Mexico were reduced to ash and rural communities were upended. Researchers are experimenting with some seedlings, giving them less water during their development as a way to harden them for the drier and warmer conditions they will face.