- Author: Jeannette Warnert
Reposted from the UCANR News Blog
Responding to the giant fire that burned 39 homes and 70,000 acres in the Clear Lake area, Warren Olney of KCRW's Which Way LA asked a UC Agriculture and Natural Resources (UC ANR) fire expert in Southern California, "Could it happen here?"
"It happens here all the time," said Tom Scott,...
- Author: Jeannette Warnert
Reposted from the UCANR News Blog
Northern California's Rocky Fire is roaring through shrublands that have no previous recorded history of wildfires, reported Kirk Siegler on All Things Considered. It has already burned 65,000 acres and is 12 percent contained, according to CalFire's Incident Report.
The area has been protected from fire for decades, primed for...
Reposted from the UCANR Green blog:
Four years of drought has left California with acres of dry brush and dying trees, abundant fuel for wildfires. Currently, CalFIRE's fire mapshows several major fires burning in California.
“There are two factors that help fires...
- Author: Susie Kocher
The fourth winter in a row of disappointing precipitation has triggered a die off of trees in the Sierra Nevada, most of which is now in ‘exceptional drought' status. The US Forest Service conducted aerial monitoring surveys by airplane in April 2015 and observed a large increase in tree mortality in the Southern Sierra (from Sonora south). Surveyors flew over 4.1 million acres of public and private forest land and found that about 20 percent had tree mortality on it, totaling over 10 million dead trees.
The Forest Service found severe mortality in many pine species especially ponderosa pine. On private lands along the foothills of the Sierras, surveyors found extensive areas of dead pines. Large areas of blue and live oak...
- Author: Sarah Yang
Reprinted from the UC Berkeley News Center.
Efforts to predict the emergence and spread of sudden oak death, an infectious tree-killing disease, have gotten a big boost from the work of grassroots volunteers.