- Author: Mike Hsu
UCCE forest advisor helps landowners, community groups determine best project options
As Californians prepare for another year of drought and an anticipated intense fire season, landowners and organizations across California have been working to reduce forest fuels – flammable woody material – that can endanger their properties and communities.
For many of them, however, their urgent efforts hit a sizable speed bump: a massive rulebook that describes, amid a thicket of other information, the permits required before people can treat or remove fuels – as well as a litany of attached requirements, restrictions and...
/h3>- Author: Trina Kleist
Conservation Agriculture Systems Innovation has been named the 2022 recipient of the Conservation Innovation Award by the Soil and Water Conservation Society, an international organization based in Ankeny, Iowa.
“This is a very nice honor… and it has been achieved by, truly, the combined work and efforts of so many,” said Jeffrey P. Mitchell, UC Cooperative Extension specialist in UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences, who helped found CASI and has been instrumental in its leadership.
CASI, part of UC Agriculture and Natural Resources, started in 1998. It was formed by farmers,...
- Author: Pamela Kan-Rice
Trees essential to lowering temperatures, cooling ‘heat islands'
Water restrictions prompted by the drought are driving Californians to prioritize how they will use their limited water. Because landscape irrigation is a major water use for many households, residents are looking outdoors to conserve water.
When choosing which landscape plants to save, “trees come first,” said Janet Hartin, UC Cooperative Extension area environmental horticulture advisor for San Bernardino, Los Angeles and Riverside counties....
- Author: Randall Oliver
Results help inform best practices for managing the disease-causing beetle
The University of California, Irvine campus is home to a vast urban forest consisting of approximately 30,000 trees located in a mix of landscape, riparian and open space settings. In the mid-2010s, that forest came under threat from an invasive species of beetle that arborists and pest researchers were just learning about – the polyphagous shothole borer.
The tiny beetles, which may have arrived in California from their native Southeast Asia via infested shipping materials, tunnel into trees and introduce a fungus that serves as food...
/h3>- Author: Mike Hsu
Pilot program in Santa Barbara County shows promise for bolstering resilience
After a rash of wildfires across Southern California in 2003, many counties, cities and neighborhoods adopted Community Wildfire Protection Plans to improve their preparedness and fire response. But Rob Hazard, fire marshal for Santa Barbara County, has noticed that CWPPs and resources are unevenly distributed across areas at high risk of wildfire.
“Communities that are more affluent, more white, they are the ones that end up getting the grants, they're the ones that end up getting the projects to mitigate risks,” Hazard said, “whereas more disadvantaged...
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