Mechanical thinning of overstocked forests, prescribed burning and managed wildfire now being carried out to enhance fire protection of California's forests provide many benefits, or ecosystem services, that people depend on.

In a paper published in Restoration Ecology, researchers at UC Merced, UC ANR and UC Irvine reported that stakeholders perceived fire protection as central to forest restoration, with multiple other ecosystem services also depending on wildfire severity. Researcher Max Eriksson, lead author on the paper, noted that "forest restoration involves multiple...

The new El Dorado/Amador Prescribed Burn association, formed in August 2021, has conducted several burns with private landowners and received funding for a part-time coordinator.

A new group of local residents dedicated to helping private landowners conduct prescribed burns on their own properties has formed in El Dorado and Amador Counties. The group was convened by Susie Kocher, forestry advisor for the University of California Cooperative Extension in the Central Sierra.

“Prescribed Burn Associations, or PBAs, are groups of landowners helping each other to both learn how to use prescribed fire to manage their properties and to...

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...

Wildfires burning in western U.S. forests have increased in size and severity since the late 20th century, with a number of recent fires exhibiting characteristics that match the criteria for mass fires – or fires that burn with high intensity over large continuous areas for long durations of time.

Operational fire behavior models, commonly used by federal and state fire suppression agencies to predict how wildfires will behave, cannot predict mass fire behavior, largely because they do not include the important combustion and fire-atmosphere interactions. The Creek Fire, which exhibited mass fire behavior when it burned through the southern Sierra Nevada in 2020, was...