- Author: Kara Manke, PhD, UC Berkeley Media Relations
Surrogates to wildfire
Trial by fire
- Author: Grace Dean
As California grapples with decades of severe wildfires, the newly established UC ANR Fire Network plays an integral role in providing and advancing science-based solutions and delivering useful tools throughout the state. Recently, the Fire Network hosted an immersive field tour for California legislative staff in collaboration with Berkeley Forests to demonstrate their work in ongoing fire and forestry research.
“We have such a rich network of fire experts and thought leaders within UC ANR,” notes Lenya Quinn-Davidson, Fire Network Director. “It was great to have everyone in one place, thinking about how we can best inspire and empower positive change through our research, education and outreach, policy, and training.”
Held on November 17th at Blodgett Forest Research Station, UC ANR staff and academics shared their research and experiences with a diverse group of legislative staff. The tour provided an opportunity for scientists and policymakers to connect over shared goals of addressing California's growing wildfire and forestry management challenges.
Sitting on 4,000 acres of Sierra forestland, Blodgett Forest Research Station is the flagship site for research within the Berkeley Forests network. The in-person visit gave attendees the opportunity to learn about the different forest management approaches practiced at Blodgett, and understand the importance of maintaining research forests across the state. “We need research facilities like Blodgett,” expressed Forestry Advisor Yana Valachovic to the tour group. “It's a way to ask these questions [about forest management],” she continued. The research questions answered through experiments at Blodgett have implications that reach beyond the station's boundary, which was demonstrated to tour guests over three tour stops.
UC ANR Specialist and Berkeley Forests Co-Director Rob York led the four-hour tour, where visitors could view different forest management treatments and heavy equipment used for treatment, and learn firsthand about UC-led collaborative research projects.
Can you run through it? Can you see through it?
Tour guests joined York at the first stop, a stand (group of trees of similar age and size) which has not seen treatment by humans for over 60 years. This first stop was a glimpse at what an unmanaged forest looks like through a forester or a wildfire scientist's eyes. Small trees, less than a few feet tall, clustered under a dense overstory, can facilitate a wildfire's quick movement from forest floor to tree canopy. Close clusters of trees make it much easier for fires to burn across a stand, and the spongy layer of duff underneath the guests' feet burns hot when conditions are dry. These stand conditions, coupled with an abundance of downed woody material, can lead to intense fire behavior when conditions are hot and dry.
Leading California wildfire scientist and UC Berkeley Professor Scott Stephens shared his stance, stating that “Taking stands that look like this into the future with climate change…is nothing less than a trainwreck.” He and York emphasized that a forest's odds of persisting through wildfires are greatly increased when fuel loads are reduced and forests are thinned. York introduced his barometer for a healthy forest density, positing that guests ask themselves: “Can I run through it? Can I see through it?” the next time they visit a forest.
This is not to say that all fire is bad for a forest. Fire is a part of a healthy forest ecosystem and has been for thousands of years- thanks to natural ignitions from lightning and Indigenous stewardship and cultural practices.
The second stop on the tour was a stand where the overstory (canopy) had been thinned, but the surface fuels were not treated with prescribed fire. York explained to the group that solely thinning a forest was not the answer, and that the best treatment would merge prescribed fire and overstory thinning treatments. In fact, a primary facet of the Fire Network's goals has been to increase the number and strength of community-based Prescribed Burn Associations (PBAs). 24 PBAs have formed throughout California since 2017, and they greatly increase community capacity for prescribed fire in both forested and non-forested ecosystems.
Eating broccoli before dessert?
The tour ended at a stand that had seen both thinning and prescribed fire treatments, and is part of an experiment comparing fire emissions to wildfire emissions. Another fuels management experiment happening at Blodgett is the use of livestock grazing as a tool to manage live fuel loads. This project is a collaborative effort between Livestock Advisor Dan Macon, Fire Network Coordinator Katie Low, and other ANR Advisors and Specialists. The effort exemplifies the way wildfire demands attention and innovation from outside the fire and forestry fields.
Macon and Low are examining the efficacy of goat grazing and its implications on animal health at Blodgett. This entails seeing how they can encourage goats to graze unfamiliar vegetation. Likening it to human behavior, Low asked the group, “If it was late at night, and you're craving a snack, which would you eat first: a bowl of steamed broccoli? Or your favorite dessert?” The goats that Macon and Low monitor clearly fill up on their ‘dessert' first and need extra encouragement to graze the woody vegetation, leading to more intervention on the herder's part. Through offering glimpses into their research, Macon, Low, and York demonstrated to the group the many approaches researchers are taking to help increase the state's wildfire resilience.
By sitting at a critical point of both research and application, UC ANR staff were able to give visitors their unique perspective on the topics of climate change, prescribed burning, and forest management on this tour. York, Stephens, and Fire Network members maintained that California policy is moving in the right direction, but encouraged staff to cease measuring impact through one lens. “It's not just about how many acres have been treated,” underscored Stephens, “it's about impact. It's about changing the direction of the forest.”
- Author: Grace Dean
The window of summer is closed, and that ‘back to school' feeling everyone knows has settled in- the excitement, the nerves, the first 7AM breakfast you've had in the last few months. However, the magic of summer lingers, and is a bit more difficult to express in words alone. Rachelle Hedges, Project and Policy Analyst for Berkeley Forests, knows that magic all too well. She sees it every year on the faces of students who come to UC Berkeley's Forestry Field Camp and its new little sibling, Forestry Mini-Camp. Both summer camps take place at 100-year old Plumas National Forest site. Hedges sets the scene: “It's incredibly peaceful: no cars, and no lights. You see people fall in love with the forest and forestry, and the specialness of these people and this place.”
While Forestry Field Camp is a summer school session for University of California undergraduates, Mini-Camp is a bit different. This one-week condensed version of the eight-week Field Camp serves as both an outreach and educational tool. Its purpose is to get community college students from around the state and UC Berkeley undergraduates interested in UC Berkeley's Ecosystem Management and Forestry major.
For Hedges, getting a cohort of community college students to Mini-Camp was also a chance to demystify the UC Berkeley experience. Hedges specifically targeted colleges that have forestry or natural resource programs, but there was no requirement that students had to have applied to UC Berkeley. By chance, most of the cohort came from urban California communities.
The Mini-Camp curriculum is loosely based on the Forestry Field Camp, but there is an emphasis on getting students out of the classroom and into the outdoors. “We want students to have fun!” Hedges emphasizes. “A lot of what camp has to offer is the fun: swimming at the lake, hiking- we want students to get excited and interested in a future at Berkeley.” Interspersing the summer camp experience was a full day on Sierra Nevada forest ecology taught by UC Berkeley instructor Rainbow de Silva, a forestry skills training led by UC ANR forestry advisor Susie Kocher, a forestry workforce presentation by Hedges, and other glimpses into forestry academia and its career world. The week was capped off by an alumni breakfast, where students could interact with past forestry majors and witness the closeness of the UC Berkeley forestry alumni network.
The Berkeley forestry network is one of the major's strongest selling points, notes Hedges. For the community college students who attended Mini-Camp, they're able to make those connections even before becoming a Berkeley student. “Now,” Hedges begins, “they have a preexisting network.” The feeling of starting a new school, the blend of excitement and nervousness? When those students start at Berkeley, that feeling will be eased by the people already waiting for them with "open arms".
“Forestry is a concept that's a bit hard to understand if you haven't experienced it,” Hedges expresses. The nature of Mini-Camp, to blend the fun with education, gives students that opportunity to see how they fit into this field. For some community college students, applying to Berkeley was an immediate goal once they left camp. Others weren't so sure, but Hedges doesn't see that as a bad thing: “Word of mouth is great, they'll go back and tell their friends about the experience. We don't need everyone to go to a four-year university. We just need to get people excited about forestry.”
- Author: Kara Manke
Reposted from the UC Berkeley News
In his years managing California woodlands, Rob York has come up with a few quick and easy ways to gage whether a forest is prepared for wildfire. “The first question I like to ask is, ‘Can you run through the forest?'” York says.
York, an assistant cooperative extension specialist and adjunct associate professor of forestry at UC Berkeley, poses the question while standing in a grove of pine trees during a tour of Blodgett Forest Research Station, a 4,000-acre experimental forest in the northern Sierra Nevada. While fire suppression has allowed many of California's forests to grow thick and dense, this patch of forest is one you could actually run through: The area is punctuated by large trees spaced a few meters apart, separated by a smooth carpet of dried pine needles.
“The idea is, if it doesn't have a lot of buildup of surface fuel on the ground — sticks and logs — you should be able to run through it,” York adds. “Looking through this forest, I might have to jump over that log, but, generally, I could take a jog through it.”
For more than 50 years, York and other Berkeley forestry researchers have used Blodgett as a living laboratory to study how different land management treatments — including prescribed burning, restoration thinning and timber harvesting — can reduce the risk of severe wildfire and improve a forest's resilience to the impacts of climate change. In addition to research, Blodgett regularly hosts workshops to demonstrate different land management techniques to landowners.
After another year of record-breaking wildfires in California, the work at Blodgett is more critical than ever, and state and federal agencies are motivated to enact more effective forest management practices. In 2020, the state and the U.S. National Forest Service jointly committed to managing 1 million acres of California forests a year, and last month the Biden administration pledged billions in new federal funding to reduce wildfire risk in the state.
“[Blodgett] was really designed to eventually demonstrate land management alternatives and offer a glimpse into how they might look at bigger scales,” York said.
Experimenting with fire
Blodgett Forest is “pretty representative of millions of acres of Sierra mixed conifer forest,” said Ariel Roughton, a research stations manager at Berkeley Forests. After the majority of its trees were logged in the early 1900s, the forest was donated to Berkeley in the 1930s with the intent that it would be used to study sustainable timber production. Aside from a few old relics that survived early logging, the majority of the trees are regrowth and approximately 100 years old.
The forest is currently divided into a patchwork of tracts, each having received a different series of treatments since active management began in the 1950s and 1960s. And while fire suppression was once the policy at Blodgett — early fire ecologist Harold Biswell was even banned from using prescribed burns out of fear that they would interfere with the timber harvest — fire is now one of the primary tools that Blodgett researchers use to maintain biodiversity and reduce the risk of severe wildfire.
“Back then, people thought, ‘Why would you ever want to use fire for land management?' They wanted to grow trees, they want to grow timber. The idea of seeing black and char was literally off the scale,” said Scott Stephens, a professor of forest science and co-director of Berkeley Forests. “It's amazing that just a few decades ago, researchers didn't have the opportunity to do the work that Rob and Ariel and others are doing up here now.”
In the open, airy tract of forest that York could easily jog through, blackened scorch marks extend 10 to 15 feet up the trunk of each tree. Ecologists believe that before European colonization, these forests experienced fire once every 10 years or less, leading to open forest structures very similar to this one. Here, two years ago, Roughton, York and their colleagues conducted a prescribed burn to remove excess fuel from the ground and reduce the risk of wildfire.
“I think it's important to remember that nature hasn't taken its course without a lot of human intervention since the last glaciation, because there was strong Indigenous burning here,” said John Battles, a professor of forest ecology at Berkeley. “There has always been intense human stewardship of one sort or another.”
According to the researchers, it took 15 to 20 years of active management, followed by regular maintenance, to get the forest tract to this state. Over the years, they have worked to achieve the open forest structure by harvesting some of the bigger trees for timber, but leaving the largest behind. They have also used a machine called a masticator to chip up smaller trees and conducted regular prescribed burns.
While there are forest management strategies that can be effective on a shorter time scale, it usually takes at least a few separate treatments over the course of a few years to successfully restore a forest and reduce its wildfire risk, York explains.
“It can be a challenge to get to the forest structure that we want,” York says. “It takes a lot of time, and it takes a lot of investment.”
Climate change is also narrowing the annual windows of time when conditions are best for prescribed burning, limiting when and how often foresters can safely burn. Hot, dry conditions usually make prescribed burning too risky during the summer, while rain and snow in the winter can leave the forest too wet and damp for fire to burn. However, research at Blodgett is showing that, with the right management decisions, prescribed burning during the winter can be made more viable.
“Because of timber harvests that removed some of the canopy and subsequent treatments to remove the ladder fuel, we now have more light hitting the ground, and it dries out faster,” Roughton said. “We've gotten to the point out here where we're able to burn more easily because of our past management actions.”
Friends of the forest
While York likes to imagine running through the trees, Battles has a slightly different metric for evaluating the health of a forest.
“You need to be able to run through the woods,” Battles said. “But I also want to see all six of my friends as I do my run.”
Battles' friends are the six tree species that make up the Sierra mixed conifer forest: oak, ponderosa pine, sugar pine, white fir, Douglas fir and incense cedar. Fire suppression — and the dense, overgrown forest structures that can result — often favor the survival of some of these species over others, leading to forests that are dominated by just one or two species. This lack of biodiversity can make the forest, as a whole, less resilient to stressors like bark beetles or tree pathogens, which often target some of these species, but not others.
According to Battles, the open structure and frequent fire at this tract of Blodgett has allowed all six of his friends to flourish.
“I see my friend, ponderosa pine, which you don't see as frequently in the unburned forest because it's shade intolerant — it needs light. I see oak, and it also requires fire to get a lot of the oaks,” Battles said. “I see all six of my friends all here, and you only see them when you have management like this.”
Over the past 20 years, research has shown that prescribed burning and mechanical thinning with tools like the masticator can also benefit soil quality and water availability, while having no significantly negative impacts on forest ecosystems. While burning or otherwise removing plants and trees can release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which accelerates the impacts of climate change, reducing the risk of severe wildfire can help maintain the whole forest for long-term carbon storage.
However, applying these techniques across 33 million acres of California forestland remains a monumental task. Prescribed burning requires a great deal of expertise and is also limited by weather conditions and air quality regulations. Meanwhile, mechanical tree thinning can be costly, and unlike timber harvesting, it does not generate any revenue for landowners — though Berkeley researchers have suggested that creating a market for small trees and other woody biomass could help offset the cost while limiting carbon emissions.
“Fire used to be so common in this system, and that's no different than in most forests in California. But, when you take it out for that long, you begin this transformation,” Stephens said. “That's why we have to get both public and private entities together to come up with a philosophy to be able to move forward on this. Blodgett is 4,000 acres — that's interesting, but it doesn't really address the needs of the state. We always hope that our work shows people what's possible and then enables them to continue it.”
/h3>/h3>- Author: Jeannette Warnert
Reposted from the UC ANR news
When conditions are right, winter can be a good time to conduct prescribed burns for forest management, says Rob York, UC Cooperative Extension forestry specialist.
“A huge issue we have in California is fire severity. We know from research that prescribed fire can be a very good tool for reducing fire severity,” York said. “For forest landowners or foresters who want to do their own prescribed burning, winter burning can be a good entry point.”
York is based at the UC Blodgett Forest Research Station in Georgetown, where he developed a series of eight short videos demonstrating how fire can be used on landscapes during the colder months. The videos feature controlled fires conducted at the station on Dec. 6 and 9, 2020. More videos in this series will be posted during the upcoming year.
Among the factors covered in the videos are climatic conditions and site selection for winter burning.
Climatic conditions
Wet or snowy weather in the fall may seem to shut the window for prescribed burning, but York said often the snow melts away and fuels dry out enough to do a winter burn.
“The idea is to be ready when the fuels dry out,” he said. Thinning trees and masticating underbrush are ways to prepare the forest for a burn.
When selecting the day of the fire, relative humidity, temperature and wind speed and direction are important considerations.
“Relative humidity should be low. You want the cloud cover to be very low. A sunny day helps dry out the fuel,” York said. “In the winter, you want that drying and heating power of the sun to help the fuel be consumed.”
Site selection
Among the factors to consider in selecting locations for winter burns is the aspect. The sun's warmth is optimized on south-facing slopes.
“That's what we're looking for,” York said. “Relatively small areas that are burnable.”
An open canopy allows sunlight to dry out the understory vegetation and surface fuels, enabling successful winter burns.
Vegetation type also weighs into winter burning decisions.
“Bear clover plus pine needles make this feasible, including conditions on the wetter side when you might not otherwise be able to burn, you can burn,” York said. “If you can encourage bear clover and pine needles, you can encourage more opportunities for low density burns, which I think do a great job to maintain low fire hazard.”
Find the complete series on the UC Forestry and Range YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/user/UCExtensionForestry) in the playlist titled Winter Prescribed Burning.
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