Posts Tagged: Natural Resources
National Moth Week Ended But...
National Moth Week ended July 27 but you can go moth-ing any time. Meanwhile, here's another look...
Moth-er scientist Volkmar Heinrich, UC Davis associate professor of biomedical engineering, displayed his images of moths. This is the adult form of the tobacco worm, Carolina sphinx, Manduca sexta.
Moth-er Volkmar Heinrich, UC Davis associate professor of biomedical engineering, answers questions about moths at the Bohart Museum Moth Night. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
Father and son moth-ers, UC Davis doctoral candidate Peter Coggan (left) and Pete Coggan of Minnesota, answer questions about moths and light pollution. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
UC Davis graduate student (forensics) Riley Hoffman and fellow Bohart volunteer Barbara Heinsch lead a family arts and crafts activity. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
UC Davis student and Bohart Museum volunteer Kaitai Liu shows a walking stick to Connor Williams, 10, of Livermore, Alameda County. The Bohart Museum open houses draw visitors from all over the region. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
Meet a Male Mantis in a Patch of Blanket Flowers
So there he is, a praying mantis in a patch of blanket flowers, Gaillardia, in a...
The male Mantis religiosa, investigates his surroundings. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
Oh, I think I'll go this way. The male praying mantis changes directions. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
The male mantis does an Olympic-style stretch. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
Noted Entomologist Jeremy McNeil (1944-2024) Treasured His Insect-Themed T-Shirts
Scientists worldwide are mourning the death of internationally celebrated entomologist Jeremy...
This screen shot of a tweet by UC Davis distinguished professor Walter Leal shows Jeremy Nichol McNeil wearing a UC Davis T-shirt, "The Beetles."
UCCE report: Local forest restoration teams effective at rapid response
Quickly planting trees after wildfires crucial for communities, ecosystems, carbon goals
As the climate crisis fuels more high-severity wildfires, many forests – adapted to bounce back from frequent but less-intense fires – are struggling to recover quickly.
“In a lot of locations, forests in the Sierra Nevada that burn at high severity are not regenerating on their own,” said Susie Kocher, University of California Cooperative Extension forestry and natural resources advisor for the Central Sierra. “They need to have living trees to drop seeds; if everything dies in an intense fire, then there's a high likelihood in those locations that trees might not return for a while.”
According to Kocher, a forest may take multiple decades to grow back on its own, seeding in very slowly from the edges of a burn. To speed up that regeneration process, a pilot program of local “Emergency Forest Restoration Teams,” or EFRTs, have been helping forest landowners rapidly remove dead trees, plant new seedlings and expedite other vital tasks after wildfires.
Kocher is a co-author of a recently released report evaluating the EFRTs, which appear to be effective in assisting often-overwhelmed private landowners navigate competitive funding programs and complicated permitting pathways after wildfire. Small private landowners in California own 7 million acres, comprising 22% of forested land across the state.
“None of our current assistance programs were really designed to rapidly respond to high-severity fire disasters,” Kocher said. “And we're just getting so much more high-severity fire now that there needed to be a different way of helping people, besides business as usual.”
Lead agencies improve coordination of restoration efforts
Drawing from a successful model in Washington, Kocher and other members of the Governor's Forest Management Task Force recommended the formation of EFRTs in 2019 and this recommendation made it into the California Wildfire and Forest Resilience Action Plan of 2021.
Following the Caldor, Dixie and Tamarack fires during that year, disaster relief funds from CAL FIRE and the U.S. Forest Service enabled the establishment of pilot EFRTs in each of the affected regions. A key innovation was designating a local lead agency to coordinate restoration efforts: the El Dorado Resource Conservation District (Caldor), the Feather River Resource Conservation District (Dixie) and Alpine County (Tamarack).
“The idea is that one well-established local agency gets the funds to carry out all the reforestation work,” Kocher said. “They find contractors for the landowners and plan and carry out all the work needed, including dead tree removal, site preparation and replanting; this helps it be more coordinated across the landscape and reduces competition for contractors.”
“Also, for most of that work, there's no cost to the landowner – which is a huge benefit to them, because these things can get really expensive, like many thousands of dollars an acre,” Kocher added.
Although there was an initial steep learning curve for the local lead agencies on the complexities of reforestation and the maze of required permits, they quickly executed a significant number of forest restoration treatments. Within two years, the three pilot teams had collectively completed over 2,500 acres of dead tree removal and 1,400 acres of conifer planting.
“The overwhelming benefit of the pilots was that a lot of work got done on the ground, that otherwise would not have been done – at least not in the timeframe that was made possible by the EFRTs,” said Daylin Wade, a UCCE staff research associate and co-author of the recent report, who synthesized feedback from interviews of professionals involved in the program.
Rapid reforestation better financially, ecologically
Both Wade and Kocher underscored how the EFRTs were crucial in completing restoration tasks in a timely manner. Removal of dead wood becomes trickier and more expensive over time, as the trees decay and are dangerous to cut down.
“A major accomplishment was getting trees out of there while it was both safe and economically viable to remove those trees – and getting trees in the ground before shrubs dominate the site,” Wade explained.
It's also imperative to quickly remove the dead trees to reduce the fuel load and minimize the chances of re-burn in the area.
“If you're not doing this work, then you're actually endangering the investment that you're putting into rebuilding communities that burned, because they're in danger of burning again if you have huge piles of dead trees everywhere,” Kocher said.
Furthermore, expediting those tasks helps restore the forest cover that is crucial for sequestering carbon and achieving the goals of California's sweeping climate action plan – such as attaining carbon neutrality by 2045.
“We have very ambitious carbon goals for our forests in California, and so reestablishing them – even on private lands – is a public benefit,” Kocher said.
Evaluation of EFRTs by UC Cooperative Extension continues
In addition to enumerating the progress of the three EFRT case studies, the evaluation report also lists recommendations to further enhance the program, such as securing rapid and flexible funding for future EFRTs, improving guidance for local lead agencies and streamlining permitting processes.
The authors also stressed the need to expand opportunities for the commercial sale of woody material in the aftermath of a wildfire event. Selling logs and wood chips reduces the volume of material that would need to processed onsite by the EFRTs and their contractors, thereby defraying some of the costs for that work.
But there simply hasn't been a sufficient market for that woody biomass.
“It's a big barrier,” Kocher said. “If we had a healthier timber market, it would be easier to make this stuff pay its own way and be less of a subsidized endeavor.”
UC Cooperative Extension's EFRT evaluation work – made possible by funding from the U.S. Forest Service State, Private and Tribal Forestry, Region 5 – will continue for the next couple years. On the heels of this first report, Wade will next gather and summarize feedback from private landowners on whether the EFRTs are meeting their goals.
And, later this summer and fall, researchers will begin assessing the ecological success of the plantings in the restoration areas, surveying seedling survival and gauging the volume of competing vegetation.
“It's hugely encouraging that we've gotten all these trees in the ground, but it's not the end of the process – it's just the beginning,” Kocher said. “Trees and forests need to be maintained over time, so this next step will let us see how successful that has been, and if there are additional steps needed to actually ensure that these trees succeed and thrive.”
The full report, dedicated to the memory of report co-author and UCCE advisor Ryan Tompkins, can be found at https://ucanr.edu/efrt.
/h3>/h3>/h3>/h3>Children's Party at the Vacaville Museum: A Honey of an Event
The Vacaville Museum Guild's annual children's party--for Vacaville children ages 3 to...
This is the bee observation hive that Ettamarie Peterson, known as the "Queen Bee of Sonoma County," will display at the children's party.
Ettamarie Peterson stands by "Miss Bee Haven," a six-foot ceramic-mosaic sculpture at the UC Davis Bee Haven. The sculpture is the work of Davis artist Donna Billick. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
Amina Harris, founding director and emerita of the UC Davis Honey and Pollination Center, stands inside her family's business, The Hive, a community gathering place in Woodland that offers honey and mead tasting.
Be a butterfly! Professor Fran Keller of Folsom Lake College, a UC Davis doctoral alumna and Bohart Museum scientist, poses as a butterfly. She wrote a children's book on the California dogface butterfly that is available in the Bohart Museum gift shop. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)