Posts Tagged: Ryan Tompkins
Sad news about Ryan Tompkins
Dear Colleagues,
It is with deep sadness that I share the news that our colleague Ryan Tompkins, forestry and natural resources advisor for Plumas, Sierra and Lassen counties, passed away on May 6, while receiving treatment for cancer. David Lile, Ryan's supervisor, has been in touch with his family, who granted me permission to inform our UC ANR community. Ryan is survived by his wife Michelle and sons Emmett and Sterling.
Ryan was well known for his warmth, kindness and quick humor. Among his colleagues, he was admired for his ability to explain technical information in creative ways that would be interesting and relatable to his audience. Ryan also loved to conduct extension work in settings that people would enjoy – sometimes this was over his BBQ, sometimes at Forestry Camp, but most often while hiking through his beloved forest to demonstrate an important point.
Ryan was a true leader and had active research and extension collaborations throughout ANR, UC Berkeley, the U.S. Forest Service, private timber and many local organizations. On topics ranging from reforestation to forest health to fire resilience, Ryan was highly respected and valued by his peers and the many communities he served. Those of you who didn't work with Ryan directly may remember his excellent town hall presentation in 2022 about making communities more resilient to wildfire.
I especially enjoyed my time with Ryan during our CARET trip to Washington, D.C. in 2023, and I will greatly miss him – as a consummate Cooperative Extension advisor and as a wonderful person. My condolences to all of you across UC ANR who called Ryan a colleague and friend.
Those wishing to send well-wishes to Ryan's family are asked to mail cards to the Plumas-Sierra Cooperative Extension office, care of Samantha Brown, 208 Fairgrounds Road, Quincy, CA, 95971. Plans are coming together for a memorial, and we will provide more details as they become available.
For those seeking support for your own well-being, I encourage you to contact the Academic and Staff Assistance Program (ASAP), which provides cost-free and confidential counseling and referral services to all UC ANR employees.
Glenda Humiston
Vice President
UCCE seeks statewide input to develop future wildfire programs
University of California Cooperative Extension has recently expanded their team of fire advisors and staff. This new group of UCCE fire professionals is interested in learning about the concerns of the communities that UCCE serves, as well as the natural resource professionals already working to address these issues.
Results from this survey will enhance the team's ability to partner with residents, landowners, agencies, academics, and other organizations to reduce California's vulnerability to wildfires. These new advisors will also share survey results with UCCE colleagues throughout the state, who already provide important fire-related programming across diverse landscapes and audiences.
"Wildfires will continue to affect all Californians, either directly or indirectly," said Katie Low, UCCE statewide fire coordinator. "It's invaluable to have the input of as many people as possible to guide the development of our wildfire-related extension programs, so that they can provide the most useful resources and information to communities across California."
The survey asks questions about topics such as:
- Gaps within existing educational programming and resources
- Challenges community members are facing in addressing wildfire risk
- Empowerment of communities to make property management decisions and prepare for wildfire
- Acceptability of prescribed fire and other fuels treatments
By participating in this study, you can choose to enter a drawing to win one of fifty $20 VISA gift cards.
To take the online survey, please visit https://bit.ly/UCCE_Fire_Survey.
This research is being led by a team of new UCCE fire advisors and staff. If you have any questions about this survey, please contact the fire/forestry professionals involved in this survey effort:
- Luca Carmignani, UCCE fire advisor for Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, and San Diego counties, carmignani@ucanr.edu
- Alison Deak, UCCE fire advisor for Fresno, Madera, and Mariposa counties, aldeak@ucanr.edu
- Katie Low, UCCE fire academic coordinator for Nevada and Placer counties, katlow@ucanr.edu
- Barb Satink Wolfson, UCCE fire advisor for Monterey, San Benito, Santa Clara, and Santa Cruz counties, bsatinkwolfson@ucanr.edu
- Ryan Tompkins, UCCE forestry advisor for Plumas, Sierra, and Lassen counties, retompkins@ucanr.edu
For more information about wildfire-related programming from University of California Cooperative Extension, please visit https://ucanr.edu/sites/fire/ or the Facebook page https://bit.ly/fireSolutions.
/span>/span>Just what is a ‘resilient’ forest, anyway?
Reposted from UC ANR news Study finds resilient, frequent-fire forests have...
Just what is a ‘resilient’ forest, anyway?
Study finds resilient, frequent-fire forests have far fewer trees
What does a “resilient” forest look like in California's Sierra Nevada? A lot fewer trees than we're used to, according to a study of frequent-fire forests from the University of California, Davis.
More than a century ago, Sierra Nevada forests faced almost no competition from neighboring trees for resources. The tree densities of the late 1800s would astonish most Californians today. Because of fire suppression, trees in current forests live alongside six to seven times as many trees as their ancestors did — competing for less water amid drier and hotter conditions.
The study, published in the journal Forest Ecology and Management, suggests that low-density stands that largely eliminate tree competition are key to creating forests resilient to the multiple stressors of severe wildfire, drought, bark beetles and climate change.
This approach would be a significant departure from current management strategies, which use competition among trees to direct forest development.
Defining ‘resilience'
But first, the study asks: Just what does “resilience” even mean? Increasingly appearing in management plans, the term has been vague and difficult to quantify. The authors developed this working definition: “Resilience is a measure of the forest's adaptability to a range of stresses and reflects the functional integrity of the ecosystem.”
They also found that a common forestry tool — the Stand Density Index, or SDI — is effective for assessing a forest's resilience.
“Resilient forests respond to a range of stressors, not just one,” said lead author Malcolm North, an affiliate professor of forest ecology with the UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences and a research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service, Pacific Southwest Research Station. “‘Resistance' is about surviving a particular stress, like fire — but there's a lot more going on in these forests, particularly with the strain of climate change.”
Competitive nature
For fire-adapted forests in the Sierra, managing for resilience requires drastically reducing densities — as much as 80% of trees, in some cases.
“Treatments for restoring resilience in today's forests will need to be much more intensive then the current focus on fuels reduction,” said Scott Stephens of UC Berkeley, a co-author on the paper.
The study compared large-scale historical and contemporary datasets and forest conditions in the southern and central Sierra Nevada, from Sequoia National Forest to the Stanislaus National Forest. It found that between 1911 and 2011, tree densities increased six- to seven-fold while average tree size was reduced by half.
A century ago, both stand densities and competition were low. More than three-quarters of forest stands had low or no competition to slow a tree's growth and reduce its vigor. In contrast, nearly all — 82%-95% — of modern frequent-fire forests are considered in “full competition.”
The study indicates that forests with very low tree densities can be more resilient to compounded threats of fire, drought and other climate stressors while maintaining healthy water quality, wildlife habitat and other natural benefits. Forests burned by high-severity fires or killed by drought lose such ecosystem services.
Wake-up call
The authors say the 2012-2016 drought, in which nearly 150 million trees died from drought-induced bark beetle infestations, served as a wake-up call to the forestry community that different approaches are required to help forests confront multiple threats, not only severe wildfires.
A shift away from managing for competitive forests and toward eliminating competition could allow the few to thrive and be more resilient.
“People have grown accustomed to the high-density forest we live in,” North said. “Most people would be surprised to see what these forests once looked like when frequent surface fires kept them at very low densities. But taking out smaller trees and leaving trees able to get through fire and drought leaves a pretty impressive forest. It does mean creating very open conditions with little inter-tree competition. But there's a lot of historical data that supports this.”
“We think resilient forests can be created, but it requires drastically reducing tree density until there's little to no competition,” said Brandon Collins of UC Berkeley, another co-author on the paper. “Doing this will allow these forests to adapt to future climate.”
Additional co-authors include Ryan Tompkins of UC Cooperative Extension, and Alexis Bernal and Robert York of UC Berkeley.
The study was funded by the National Park Service Pacific West Region, U.S. Forest Service Pacific Southwest Research Station, U.S. Joint Fire Sciences Program, and the UC Agriculture and Natural Resources Division.
/h3>/h3>/h3>/h2>Moving beyond America’s war on wildfire: 4 ways to avoid future megafires
Californians have been concerned about wildfires for a long time, but the past two years have left many of them fearful and questioning whether any solutions to the fire crisis truly exist.
The Dixie Fire in the Sierra Nevada burned nearly 1 million acres in 2021, including almost the entire community of Greenville. Then strong winds near Lake Tahoe sent the Caldor Fire racing through the community of Grizzly Flats and to the edges of urban neighborhoods, forcing the evacuation of tens of thousands of people – including one of us. Those were only the biggest of the 2021 fires, and the risk isn't over. A wind-blown fire that started Oct. 11 was spreading quickly near Santa Barbara on the Southern California coast.
As foresters who have been working on wildfire and forest restoration issues in the Sierra Nevada for over a quarter of a century, we have found it painful to watch communities destroyed and forests continuing to burn to a crisp.
The main lesson we gather from how these fires have burned is that forest fuels reduction projects are our best tools for mitigating wildfire impacts under a changing climate, and not nearly enough of them are being done.
Two historic policies, in our view, led the western U.S. to the point where its forests have become so overgrown they're fueling megafires that burn down whole communities.
Fire suppression
The first policy problem is fire suppression and exclusion.
Fire is an essential ecological process, and many of the ecosystems in the West are adapted to frequent fire, meaning plant and wildlife species have evolved to survive or even thrive after wildfires. But most people arriving in California during colonization, both before and after the Gold Rush of 1849, fundamentally misunderstood the nature of frequent fire forests.
As state and federal agencies evolved policies on forest management, they considered all fire to be an existential problem and declared war. The U.S. Forest Service kicked off a century of fire suppression in the West after the devastating fires of 1910, known as the “Big Blowup” or “Big Burn,” by implementing the 10 a.m. policy. It aimed for full suppression of all fires by 10 a.m. the day after they broke out.
Native people who practiced prescribed fire to manage forests were removed from their homelands, and burning was criminalized. California made prescribed fire illegal in 1924, and it remained illegal for decades until a better appreciation of its importance emerged in the 1970s.
Past harvesting practices lead to regulations
The second policy issue is the regulatory approach that grew out of past logging practices.
Foresters and early California communities were interested in forests for lumber and fuel wood. They sent the largest – and most fire-tolerant – trees to mills to be turned into lumber, which was used to build California's cities and towns.
Poorly executed logging in some areas led to concerns from residents that forest cover and habitat was shrinking. As a result, state and federal regulations were developed in the 1970s that require managers proposing forest projects to consider a “no action alternative.” In other words, maintaining dense forest habitat in the long term was considered a viable management choice.
On private land, few owners today thin the forest to levels that would mimic the more fire-resilient forests found in the Sierra at colonization. The California Forest Practices Act until recently required replanting after timber harvest to levels much more dense than were found at colonization. In other words, our current regulatory framework promotes maintaining high levels of forest density, when much more drastic removal of vegetation is needed.
Taken together, these policies have promoted 21st-century forests that are younger, denser and more homogenous – making them vulnerable to increasingly severe disturbances such as drought, insect outbreaks and fire. This new reality is exacerbated by a changing climate, which turns the regulatory assumption that active and widespread forest management is riskier than no management on its head.
Agency priorities change as the crisis grows
Just as forests have changed, so too have the agencies that manage and regulate them. The U.S. Forest Service has seen its budgets for fighting fires balloon while its capacity to proactively manage forests has been shrinking. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, known as CAL FIRE, has also seen large increases in firefighting budgets, though the state legislature has recently moved to increase fire prevention funds, too.
Living in communities threatened by wildfires this summer, we are very grateful to firefighters who have saved our homes. Yet we also are concerned that more large, high-severity wildfires burning across the landscape mean less funding and staff will be available for proactive fuels reduction projects like forest thinning and prescribed fires.
How do we get out of this mess?
The Dixie and Caldor fires that destroyed Greenville and Grizzly Flats provided evidence that forest fuels reduction projects can work.
Both fires burned less severely in areas with proactive forest restoration and fuels management projects, including near South Lake Tahoe and near Quincy.
Fuels reduction projects include thinning out trees, burning off woody debris and reducing “ladder fuels” like small trees and brush that can allow fire to reach the tree canopy. They create more open forests that are less likely to fuel severe megafires. They also create strategic areas where firefighters can more easily fight future blazes. And, because fires burn less intensely in thinned forests, they leave more intact forest after a fire for regenerating new trees and sequestering carbon. Prescribed fires and managed ignitions paid huge dividends for containing the Dixie and Caldor fires.
To manage fires in an era of climate change, where drier, hotter weather creates ideal conditions for burning, experts estimate that the area treated for fuels reduction needs to increase by at least an order of magnitude. We believe government needs to accomplish these four things to succeed:
1) Drastically increase funding and staff for agencies' fuels reduction projects, as well as outreach, cost-sharing and technical assistance for private forestland owners. Although the Biden administration's proposal for a Civilian Climate Corps proposes funding to bring in more young and unskilled workers, funding more federal and state agency positions would recruit more natural resource professionals, provide career-track opportunities and better add forest restoration capacity for the long term.
2) Reduce regulations on forest and fuels management efforts for both public and private land. While California and the federal government have made recent strides to streamline regulations, land management agencies need to acknowledge the biggest risk in frequent fire forests is doing nothing, and time is running out. Agencies need to drastically cut the time needed to plan and implement fuels reduction projects.
3) Invest in communities' capacity to carry out local forest restoration work by providing long-term support to local organizations that provide outreach, technical assistance and project coordination services. Funding restoration through competitive grants makes development of long-term community capacity challenging at best.
4) Provide funds and financial incentives for at risk communities to retrofit homes to withstand wildfires and reduce fuels around homes, communities and infrastructure.
Under a changing climate, we will have to learn to coexist with wildfires in the U.S. West, but this will require concerted action and a cultural shift in how we view and manage our forests and communities to be resilient.
Susan Kocher, Cooperative Extension Forester and Natural Resources Advisor, University of California, Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources and Ryan E. Tompkins, Cooperative Extension Forester and Natural Resources Advisor, University of California, Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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