They are. As an example of why those details are important (remembering that old adage that a little knowledge can be dangerous): one of the things that hand crews want to be careful of in the chapparal vegetation ecosystem, per se, is fire that gets down into drainages below them. The fuel types, largely oak scrub, manzanita and friends, are prone to sudden and unexpected fire behavior due to the uneven ways that oak scrub and manzanita burn.
There’s plenty of video of crews, for instance, doing a firing operation on a ridge, to suddenly have a sheet of flame rise up over the ridge line, as it’s not uncommon for drainages full of old oak to have pockets of manzanita within them, difficult to see in a thicket. When those pockets burn, they burn very hot because they are a high energy plant species full of sugars. You really, really, need to know if fire is getting into that stuff in the drainage bottoms below you.
