Restoring Forests on Public Lands in the Sierra
In 1894, John Muir described the “inviting openness” of Sierra forests—home to enormous, widely spaced trees and incredible biodiversity. While many once assumed this openness was natural, Native Americans had in fact been managing the landscape for millennia, using fire to maintain forest health and ensure plentiful food and game.
Sadly, today’s Sierra would be unrecognizable to Muir. Decades of logging and wildfire suppression have reshaped the landscape. Where forests of diverse species and age once stood, homogeneous stands of young trees now predominate. Wildlife that rely on old-growth conditions, such as spotted owls and wolverines, are declining. And the forests that provide over half of California’s developed water supply are at serious risk from wildfire, drought and climate change.
The challenge of restoring the forests in the Sierra Nevada is too great and too urgent for the U.S. Forest Service to meet alone. The Forest Service is currently restoring about 47,000 acres per year, four to five times less than the amount needed to address the problem. Thankfully, our partner, The Nature Conservancy, recognizes the problem and has stepped up to take a leadership role in accelerating the pace and scale of ecologically sound forest and watershed restoration in the Northern Sierra. The Conservancy’s work includes:
Implementing forest restoration pilot projects on lands The Conservancy has acquired or helped to acquire including Independence Lake and the American River Headwaters property;
Working with the U.S. Forest Service, state agencies, water utilities and a diversity of other stakeholders to implement forest restoration pilot projects on public lands as part of the Tahoe Central Sierra Initiative (see below); these projects involve the selective removal of small trees and undergrowth and, when conditions permit, the use of controlled burns and managed wildfire; and
Helping to educate the public and the media about the need for landscape-scale forest restoration in the Sierra and the scientific basis for such efforts.
Over the next decade, The Conservancy and its partners will be working to return Sierra forests to a healthier and more resilient condition. This, in turn, will reduce the risk of megafires and protect habitat, water quality and native biodiversity.
For more information about The Nature Conservancy’s forest restoration efforts in the Sierra, please contact Dan Porter at dporter@tnc.org.
The Tahoe-Central Sierra Initiative (TCSI) is a multi-stakeholder effort to harness the best available science and the skills of a diverse suite of partners to increase the pace and scale of forest restoration across the watersheds of the central Sierra Nevada, including Lake Tahoe. In addition to implementing pilot projects like the French Meadows Project and the North Yuba Forest Partnership, the TCSI Partners are pioneering new, more collaborative approaches to planning and funding restoration projects and working together to address constraints to progress like the inadequacy of biomass utilization infrastructure in the Sierra.
Projects under the Tahoe-Central Sierra Initiative (TCSI):
French Meadows
The Nature Conservancy is partnering with the U.S. Forest Service, Placer County Water Agency, Placer County, the Sierra Nevada Conservancy, American River Conservancy and the Sierra Nevada Research Institute at UC Merced to restore 28,000 acres in the headwaters of the Middle Fork of the American River, just west of Lake Tahoe. The Conservancy and its partners hope the project will serve as a model to increase the pace and scale of forest restoration on national forest lands throughout the Sierra. TNC recently published a Lessons Learned Paper on behalf of the French Meadows partners summarizing the key determinants to the success of the project and making policy and practice recommendations for future partnerships. Those key elements include:
Collaborative management that allows the project to advance quickly and efficiently
Funding from a wide variety of federal, state, local and private sources
Shared stewardship to accelerate on-the-ground restoration
Documenting the benefits of forest restoration on water supply and forest health
Innovative planning, including use of state-of-the-art fire behavior modeling
North Yuba Forest Partnership
The North Yuba Forest Partnership is a diverse group of nine organizations passionate about forest health and the resilience of the North Yuba River watershed. Together, the partners are working on an unprecedented scale to collaboratively plan, analyze, finance and implement forest restoration across 275,000 acres of the watershed. The partnership includes: the Yuba Water Agency, the U.S. Forest Service, The Nature Conservancy, South Yuba River Citizens League, Camptonville Community Partnership, Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan Tribe, National Forest Foundation, Sierra County and Blue Forest Conservation.
Through ecologically-based thinning and prescribed fire, the partnership seeks to protect North Yuba communities from the threat of catastrophic wildfire and restore the watershed to a healthier, more resilient state. Restoration efforts are expected to take many years, if not decades to complete. The first priorities within the watershed will be: at-risk communities, emergency response, evacuation access routes and areas where treatment could stop a wildfire from spreading.
The North Yuba watershed includes thousands of acres of forest that are rich in biodiversity and are an important source of water to downstream users.
Forest restoration underway.
Forest where wildfires have been suppressed for too long (smaller trees need removal).
Photo credit: Historical Forest © U.S. Forest Service Albert Everett Wieslander, Marian Koshland Bioscience and Natural Resources Library, UC Berkeley | French Meadows Forest Restoration © The Nature Conservancy | TSCI Map © The Nature Conservancy | French Meadows Owl Habitat © The Nature Conservancy