We hope that the information on this page will not only increase your comfort level and knowledge of forest stewardship, fire, and treatment options to reduce the likelihood of high-severity fire on your property, but also introduce you to landscape-scale forest dynamics. As you navigate around this page we hope that you keep one primary philosophy in mind: there is no single right answer to the problem of fire in the Sierra foothills.

Introduction to Landscape-Scale Management

The best way to think about landscape-scale management is to take a bird’s eye view of the landscape and your property, even when treating it from ground level. For example, when you come upon a dense wall of vegetation so thick you can’t see what’s on the other side (nor how far it goes), your first thought may be “dense fuel…I should treat that”. In most circumstances, this would probably be correct (depending on the treatment type you choose to employ). But when we think of landscape-scale forest dynamics, we need to think about that dense wall of vegetation in the context of the surrounding forest; maybe there’s a large clearing on the other side—in fact, maybe there’s a large clearing all around it, and it’s an isolated “island” of dense vegetation. If that’s the case, we can leave the island of dense vegetation as it is, as wildlife habitat, knowing its transmission of fire would be unlikely given its surroundings, or knowing its okay for that island to burn during a fire. Remember: we treat to invite low-severity fire, not to prevent it. Fire is a healthy part of this landscape, and if our forests are healthy and carrying a reasonable amount of fuel, fire becomes a tool and does the follow-up treatments for us!

Taking (or imagining) a bird’s eye view of the forested landscape also allows us to consider one of the most important predictors of fire behavior and severity: “heterogeneity”, or how variable a forest’s structure is. Density matters, but it matters more when fuels are connected to each other. When we treat, we need to think about not just how a single “ladder fuel” (fuels that connect ground fuels to tree canopies) tree is connected to the fuels above it, but actually how our parcel is connected to those around it. Where are the gaps on the greater landscape? The clumps? The long connected walls of vegetation? These are the corridors, buffers, and islands that we really need to consider.