From Protection to Resilience: How Collaborative Stewardship Transforms Forests
TRT Forest Health Project Managers conduct a site visit
Driving down a muddy forest road, Madelyn and Ande, Forest Health Project Managers at TRT, point out a section of forest that TRT prepared for a prescribed burn last year. To the right are tall stands of ponderosa pines, sugar pines, and incense cedar, gently seasoned black but thriving, with clear and open ground around them. Further down the road is a forest so dense it’s like a wall.
You can see it, the fuel ladder, small brush leading way to midstory trees, leading way to the canopy. This combustible growth pattern is how fire goes from ground level spread to an intense canopy-level crown fire in a flash.
Forests function through a complex interplay of collaborations, and caring for Californian forests after over a century of fire suppression is a highly collaborative act too. There are threatened yellow-legged frogs to consider; shifting science to respond to; relationships to build with private landowners, tribes, and government agencies; and tens of thousands of forested acres to prepare—more land under TRT’s care than ever before. Full of nimble adaptation and stop-and-start momentum, TRT’s year working in the Stanislaus National Forest was our most ambitious and challenging one to date.
Recovering from a paradigm of fire suppression means a shift to preventative management, and TRT is at the forefront of this change. Most visibly, TRT’s forest health work prepares mountain communities and the Stanislaus National Forest to fight catastrophic fires. But the sparks of this work catch and radiate well beyond by contributing to air and water quality from the Sierra to the Bay Area, creating climate adaptive jobs, and prioritizing stewardship of the Greater Yosemite Region’s forests and rivers—spaces of recreation loved the whole world over. It is federally funded projects like this one that are most at risk with the coming federal administration.
Ande Myers, TRT Forest Health Project Manager, looks over a recently thinned fuel break
Scale and Complexity
If that all sounds enormously interconnected that’s because it is. Ben Campbell, TRT’s Forest Health Program Director shared that even though we are not the only ones working on the SERAL (Social and Ecological Resilience Across the Landscape) project, which is a coalition of many, “we do at least half or more of the total fuels reduction implementation in any given year,” and that this year “we've increased the complexity of this project two or threefold, primarily due to increased scope of work and the remoteness of projects, which results in long drive times, caused by poor quality roads.”
In trying to see the forest for the trees, what work falls within our scope anyhow?
Madelyn and Ande walk through a newly treated unit—of forest undergoing thinning of excess undergrowth and overcrowded midstory trees. Here the ground is clear and recently downed trees act as habitat or organic matter mulching the ground. Zooming out, we are standing in the middle of a landscape-scale fuel break, itself part of a 6,000-acre project that aims to eventually connect into an even larger fuel break network across several hundred thousand-acres of land.
This year, TRT’s work expanded to include collaboration with more private landowners. To think like fire, we can’t get hung up on the boundaries of private property, fire doesn’t consider ownership so fuel breaks have to cross these human boundaries too. On this side of the Stanislaus, many private property owners live in isolated and economically disadvantaged rural areas. Relationship building and outreach to encourage participation in this expansive network of fuel breaks was a time consuming part of this year’s work.
“There's been a lot of discontinuity of fuel breaks because of how challenging it is to work across boundaries,” shared Ben but “I've certainly gained a lot more optimism. My expectations have been inverted; I was expecting there to be more challenges, but all I've been hearing is homeowners being really involved and enthusiastic about the work. They recognize the importance of it, because they don't want their homes to burn down either.”
Madelyn and Ande collaborate on tracking project progress
Alongside these collaborations that stitch together National Forest lands with privately held properties, TRT worked with Tuolumne County to develop new co-stewardship partnerships with local tribes, the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation and the Tuolumne Band of Me-Wuk. Ben shared that, “we have tribes involved in the stewardship of their ancestral homeland. Specifically, Tuolumne County and TRT have contracted with these tribes to conduct hand treatment in archaeological sites. These areas are traditionally avoided to prevent damage to the sites. However, avoiding these areas results in fuel accumulation, which jeopardizes their safety as well.” Ben went on to say that as paid contractors “the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation stepped up to do the majority of the fuels work, and the Tuolumne Band of Me-Wuk has involved themselves as the archeological monitors.” This work enables local tribes to steward their ancestral lands while also preserving their own ancestral cultural sites.
Welcome Fire
The Stanislaus hasn’t burned catastrophically in recent human history, so forest health work in the Stanislaus strives to prevent megafire at that level. It does not strive to prevent all fire, with the knowledge that some amount of fire is healthy for the land.
This idea is not new: Indigenous stewards thinned and lightly burned forests in the Sierra Nevada as a management technique prior to white settlement. M. Kat Anderson’s book Tending the Wild recounts the storied history of how fire suppression normalized during the 1900s through various federal legislations—a hands-off approach that eventually turned Sierran forests into over-dense tinderboxes. The life drive of forests is one of succession. If left unchecked by the hand of human stewards and the balancing act of healthy fire, a forest propagates and becomes more forest—on and on.
In Tending the Wild, released in 2005, James Rust, a Southern Sierra Miwok said: “In the old days … they burned to keep down the brush. The fires wouldn’t get away from you. It wouldn’t take all the timber like it would now. In those times the creeks ran all year round. You could fish all season. Now you can’t because there’s no water. Timber and brush now take all the water. I remember Yosemite when I was a kid. You could see from one end of the Valley to the other. Now you can’t even see off the road.”
Cut to today, and the age of intensified megafires has everyone’s attention. Legislations such as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act increased funding to the National Forest Service and partner organizations like TRT for wildfire mitigation work at this scale and speed.
Madelyn described current forest health work as similar to a root canal, and similarly, Ben described it as chemotherapy. Both metaphors paint the picture of high intervention overhauls that will eventually enable forests to handle natural fire patterns without every spark leading to catastrophic megafire.
“What we're doing is not something that mimics pre-contact or pre-colonial management. It's mostly just getting us to a place where those things can happen again. These are unnatural, but necessary things, just like how you want your body to have an immune system that functions healthily, but sometimes you have to give it medicine. It's the same concept,” Ben noted.
A Forest of Flags
Back at the unit, Ande is taking notes on the recent thinning work done by contracted machine operators, leaving detailed insights on the team’s shared GIS maps. They note a small area of upturned soil where they’ve been collaborating with machine operators, to clean off machine treads so that invasive cheatgrass seeds don’t spread further throughout the forest. The work is heavy, but with such sensitivity to the finer details of ecological health.
Ande points out bright plastic flagging that dots the unit. These flags are a relay of communication between TRT’s staff and the machine operators, marking areas where heavy machines should not go. Each flag marks important boundaries, sensitive plants, places where protected animals might be found, and areas of archeological importance, like those the Tuolumne Band of Me-Wuk are monitoring for.
These hand-laid flags are the work of TRT’s Forest Operations Specialists team. Their summer was full of a bushwhacking game of twister through thick, vining poison oak, dense manzanita, and other brushy understory plants. Ande and Madelyn demonstrate and recount the process: wrestling around branches, trying to find a way in and through the brushy tangle, then calling to the next person to confirm a route that worked.
To mark the sites you first have to get into them. This isn’t a maintained hiking trail, so forest operations teams have special moves, or at least an aptitude for winging it—a necessary skill for navigating the density of a fire-suppressed forest.
River Connection
It might feel like a diversion—a river-based organization doing all of this forest health work, but it all connects. The Stanislaus National Forest supports two watersheds. The forest on the north side of Hwy 108 converges with the Stanislaus River, and on the south side all the water connects with the Tuolumne River watershed.
Catastrophic fires bring erosion and increased sediment loads that flood our waterways. Preventing catastrophic fire also supports water quality for humans, fish, and the whole ecosystem. Besides this, Ben also shared that, “there's an auxiliary benefit that is more water in rivers because of less vegetation transpiring. Each piece of vegetation is a straw in the ground that's sucking a small amount of water up. There's millions of them, so the fewer straws you have sucking water up, the more water availability you have, which means more water in the rivers.”
He also noted that because of our current practice of chipping felled trees “we're creating this layer of mulch, which is then going to take that water, and just like it would in a garden, allow it to very slowly percolate into the soil and then raise the water table, subsequently benefitting the river.”
In some areas of the project, felled trees will stay in place, acting as habitat, just like with natural tree fall.
Of Woodrats and Other Creatures
Back onsite, Ande and Madelyn are looking over the mulched matter, making sure it is to specification and that the structure of the soil isn’t being overly disrupted by machine tracks. Amidst this purposeful pile of woody debris is yet another pile of woody debris, although this one a little more architectural in style. It’s a woodrat nest that the machine operators delicately maneuvered around, saving habitat, home, and also a primary food source of the threatened California spotted owl. They didn’t have to, but they did, demonstrating the diligent care that contracted machine operators have for TRT’s environmental ethos, but also for the forest itself.
This sensitivity extends out into a broader set of considerations around protected species as defined by the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service. Official species designations change in real time, and TRT’s work around these changes was considerable this year. Yellow-legged frogs, California spotted owls, and Pacific fishers were all species of concern to work around on many TRT managed forest sites.
The U.S Fish and Wildlife Service monitors and designates places where these species might be found and it is part of TRT’s job to carefully direct heavy machine work around these potential habitat sites. Accidentally killing one of these sensitive creatures would exacerbate the decline of their population, already strained by forces like human development and climate change. It’s for these reasons that an accidental kill comes with steep consequences: projects grind to a halt, larger investigations ensue, and species decline continues, so TRT is diligent in preparations and precautions. It’s all a series of checks and balances, making sure the forest health work doesn’t create fire resilience at the expense of sensitive native species.
A mature black oak tree provides acorns and habitat within a shaded fuel break
This year was complex, full of adjustments, and promising new collaborations. The coming year also brings promises: the challenges of a changing political tide. Future discontinuation of federal funding programs like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law could directly impact this program and work, but it’s hard to imagine this project slowing down. The benefits are immense and the risks of catastrophic fire are very real.
Looking around the forest is picturesque: golden hued black oaks shimmer in the autumn wind, jays announce themselves loudly while collecting ample acorns, and the mist settles on distant ridgelines. Upon closer looking, more visions emerge: carefully stacked burn piles, cleared forest floors, and the light trace of a prescribed burn—all reflections of dedicated labor by those who care for these forests—to the benefit of all who live, work, and play in the Greater Yosemite Region.
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