- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
Healthy California wildlands were managed with periodic wild and cultural fires for millennia. As the state's population and development grew, officials suppressed most fires out of concern for people, homes and businesses.
Though well-meaning, the strategy left land overgrown with vegetation capable of fueling even more dangerous high-intensity wildfires. The past few years have seen an exponential increase in catastrophic wildfires in California.
As a result, there is growing interest in using prescribed fire to bring nature back into balance. Despite the current interest, communities have limited capacity, shared knowledge and experience to bring it back. To close...
- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
With a $379,785 grant from CAL FIRE, UC Cooperative Extension and the Resource Conservation District of Monterey County are spearheading a community effort to create a prescribed burn association along California's Central Coast region.
The grant is one of 55 awarded by CAL FIRE to reduce the risk of devastating wildfires that take lives and destroy homes and valued wildland environments across California.
“These 55 local projects will play a critical role in augmenting our fire prevention efforts,” said CAL FIRE director Chief Thom Porter.
Prescribed burn associations (PBAs) are made up of ranchers,...
- Author: Pamela Kan-Rice
The Camp Fire that destroyed the town of Paradise and other wildfires that have devastated communities in recent years have convinced wildfire experts that Californians need to take more than one approach to coexist with fire.
To better protect new houses against wildfire, California has building codes, but where residential communities are built on the landscape and how they are designed are also very important to limit wildfire-related losses, according to University of California Cooperative Extension specialists Max Moritz and Van Butsic.
“Defensible space and vegetation management is important, but in the long term, where and how we build new...
- Author: Jacob Shea, jacob_shea@berkeley.edu
Around the world, countries have established protected areas as the primary defense to reduce widespread biodiversity loss and guard vulnerable habitats. However, species and ecosystems are adapted to particular climates—as those climates shift across and outside of protected area boundaries, species may track them into unprotected landscapes where human land uses degrade conservation potential.
In a new study published in Science Advances today, Berkeley researchers offer a broad analysis of how protected areas will continue to capture the...
- Author: Kristian M Salgado
We would like to congratulate the 13 Imperial County farmers who received a total of $1,073,697.97 from CDFA's Healthy Soil Incentive Program.
California Department Food and Agriculture (CDFA) has been providing financial initiatives to California growers and ranchers through its Healthy Soil Program to enable farmers to implement conservation management practices that sequester carbon, reduce atmospheric greenhouse gases (GHGs), and improve soil health.
These 13 award-winning projects will reduce GHG emissions by an estimated 3,689.1 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, which is equivalent to 797 passenger vehicles driven for one...
