A new climate-resilient, carbon stable forest emerging in Camp Fire burn zone

Outside the town of Concow in the middle of a high-severity burn zone that lost nearly 100 percent of the trees after the 2018 Camp Fire sprouts new life in the form of what researchers and project partners hope won’t just be a thriving open oak-dominated forest, but one much more adapted to future drought and wildfire.

The Camp Fire burned through the dense mixed conifer forests of the Concow Basin and along tributaries to the North Fork of the Feather River killing nearly every tree in its path. With little to no seed source across the high-severity burn zone, the landscape, without intervention, will likely become a chapparal-dominated brushland.

“For some parts of the Concow Basin, the Camp Fire was the third time in 20 years that it had burned at high severity. Given this fire history, plus climate change, it no longer seemed to make much sense to replant a conifer forest a third time in this foothill zone,” said Wolfy Rougle, planning and watershed program manager with the Butte County Resource Conservation District. “At least, not in the way it had conventionally been done in the past. We also understood that if we did nothing, what had been dense forest would most likely type-convert to chaparral, which nobody was excited about.”

The project, funded by the Sierra Nevada Conservancy (SNC) for both the planning phase in Oct. of 2019 for $64,000 and implementation in July of 2021 for $2.1 million, is currently restoring at least 442 acres of severely burned Sierra foothill forestland outside the town of Concow. It consists of oak-pine planting on 68 acres and oak release on 374 additional acres. Releasing oak trees is a management effort that essentially helps existing oak seedlings grow strong and healthy through pruning and removal of competitive vegetation, such as dense brush, that out compete for critical water and sunshine.

The project is also being complemented by what forest managers call “founder stand pyrosilviculture” on an additional 292 acres, which is the planting of trees in dense, strategic locations so they become the “founders,” or seed sources, for future trees in the area. These stands and the surrounding area will be periodically treated with prescribed fire to keep existing trees healthy and adapted to future high-severity wildfires.

Since oak trees can resprout from their root systems after a high-severity wildfire and conifers can’t – which was evident across the post Camp Fire landscape in the months after the blaze, noted Rougle – restoration efforts focused more on oaks rather than pines.

“As the climate warms, some species, like sugar pine, are retreating uphill. We wanted to be really conscious about how we replanted conifers, because they don’t resprout after fire, and if fires are going to happen every 10 years then it might be tough to have conifer forests reestablish,” Rougle added. “But still, conifers are an important part so we did replant some, but only in sites where we thought fire effects would be mildest, like on ridgetops and north-facing slopes.”

Project complemented by tribal involvement

The local Konkow Tribe, which has been stewarding the land long before European settlers made their way into the region, is also helping to ensure both oaks and conifers successfully return to this vital watershed. The presence of many bedrock mortars, which are circular depressions caused by years of pounding oak acorns into flour, in the granite rocks in the greater watershed are not only signs that Native Americans once thrived in the region, but so, too, did more oak trees.

“We looked at the rich record of acorn mortars in the area and talked to local tribal leaders from the Konkow Valley Band of Maidu Indians. We learned that before the 1800s, 10 times more people may have lived in Concow than live there today – and they all ate acorns,” Rougle said. “If oak woodland was actually the recent past of much of the Concow Basin, we started thinking, could we also make it its future?”

The KonKow Valley Band of Maidu is not just providing research and traditional ecological knowledge to ensure the landscape remains adapted but is also helping to monitor the health of the oak-dominated forests and beneficial native plants over the long term.

“It is rare for a project to combine fuels reduction and meaningful restoration in a single scope of work, but it is even rarer for traditional knowledge to be sought out and integrated into the project,” said Jessica Lopez, former tribal chair, KonKow Valley Band of Maidu. “I am looking forward to this project and to selecting some of my traditional knowledge to share with the rest of California.”

According to Rougle, the tribal involvement has been one of the highlights of the project, especially when it comes to the discovery and protection of cultural resources.

“I would say one of the biggest successes has been in tribal capacity,” she said. “The funding allowed us to build into the project and gave the Konkow Tribe the ability to boost their team of cultural resource monitors. This led to them discovering a ton about their own homeland that no one alive today really knew, and they’re just getting started.”

Project is ideal nature-based solution

As a global leader in combatting climate change, the state of California has set nature-based solutions as critically important to help reduce carbon and has set nature-based solution climate targets to help achieve carbon neutrality by 2045. These climate targets are set over the seven majority land types that make up California, including forests that compromise nearly 30% of the state.

Over the last 21 years, the SNC has funded and supported essential projects that drive nature-based solutions across the Sierra-Cascade region such as helping to turn a high-severity burn zone back into a thriving forest. Forests that are more adapted to major disturbances, such as wildfire, help achieve California’s climate goals.

“If frequent large high-severity fires become the norm, California could lose its fight to keep our forests sequestering more carbon than they emit. We can’t and shouldn’t restore the kind of forest Concow had before the fire, because it was too dense and conifer-dominated due to long-term fire suppression,” said Brittany Dyer, former California state director, American Forests. “However, we can restore it back to a more open, oak-dominated forest that is more appropriate for the foothill climate. This strategy best promotes carbon stability, wildlife values, and WUI community safety.”

A healthy, ‘designed,’ adapted forest emerging

The goal of the SNC-funded Concow Resilience Project is not just to prevent large-scale conversion from forestland to brushland due to the destructive Camp Fire, but to also increase the chance for long-term health and survival of trees in the region by creating an open, oak-pine dominated woodland more adapted to future wildfires and climate change.

As Lopez put it: “The Concow Basin did not develop into a beautiful, biodiverse place without any human tending. It might have looked wild to settlers, but it was actually a garden where Native peoples grew everything they needed for thousands of years. It was open, fire-adapted, and full of meadows not by chance but by design.”