CAL FIRE Forest Health Awards

CAL FIRE Awards $142 Million For Critical Wildfire Resilience Projects Statewide
CAL FIRE recently announce that $142.6 million has been awarded for statewide investments in projects intended to enhance carbon storage while restoring the health and resilience of existing and recently burned forests throughout California.
CAL FIRE’s Forest Health Program awarded 27 grants to local and regional partners implementing projects on state, local, tribal, federal, and private lands spanning over 75,000 acres and 24 counties. Fuels reduction and prescribed fire treatments funded under these grants are aimed at reducing excess vegetation and returning forest and oak woodlands to more fire, drought, and pest-resilient conditions.
“These investments demonstrate CAL FIRE’s ability to deliver on the Governor’s Action Plan and are vital to protect the health of our forests and the safety of our communities.”
– Patrick Wright, Director, California Wildfire & Forest Resilience Task Force
Planscape now lives on the Task Force website

Planscape Now Lives on the Task Force Website
A collaborative effort between CA Natural Resources Agency, USFS, UC Berkeley, Spatial Informatics Group and Google.org, Planscape is a decision support tool that empowers regional planners to prioritize resilience treatments across the landscape and inform the funding process. Planscape partners provided a demonstration of the tool at the March 30 Task Force meeting. This version of the tool is available for beta testing, with the region-specific scenarios released this summer through fall.
RESOURCES
CAL FIRE Announces New Grants Available For Multiple Initiatives

CAL FIRE Announces New Grants Available For Multiple Initiatives
Funding is now available for a wide range of critical needs, from forest health and post-fire reforestation to workforce development and green school yards.
WILDFIRE PREVENTION GRANTS PROGRAM: Up to $120 million for projects focused on protecting people, structures, and communities.
FOREST HEALTH GRANT PROGRAM: Up to $120 million for landscape scale forest restoration and resilience projects.
POST FIRE REFORESTATION AND REGENERATION: Up to $50 million for reforestation treatments.
BUSINESS AND WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT: Up to $7.5 million for wood products and up to $5 million for biomass transportation subsidy projects.
GREEN SCHOOL YARDS: Up to $117 million to improve tree canopy cover on California K-12 public school campuses and nonprofit childcare facilities.
TRIBAL WILDFIRE RESILIENCE PROGRAM: Up to $15 million is available for wildfire resilience implementation projects. These grant funds will assist California Native American tribes in managing ancestral lands, implementing and promoting Traditional Ecological Knowledge in wildfire resilience, and establishing wildfire safety for tribal communities.
RESOURCES
California Reforestation Pipeline Partnership Aims to Address Key Reforestation Challenges

California Reforestation Pipeline Partnership Aims to Address Key Reforestation Challenges
The California Reforestation Pipeline Partnership (RPP) is a strategic collaboration to help address challenges related to the scale of post-burn reforestation opportunities on public and private lands between the U.S. Forest Service Region 5, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE) and the non-profit conservation organization American Forests.
The RPP Cooperative is a new effort of the RPP to increase public-private cooperation on the supply chain that enables reforestation, and is set to kickoff Friday, November 4 in Sacramento with a gathering of top land management officials and forestry professionals.
The need for the RPP emerged from Governor Gavin Newsom’s California Wildfire and Forests Resilience Task Force Reforestation Strategy Working Group, and through a national study, “Challenges to the Reforestation Pipeline in the United States,” which uncovered knowledge and structural gaps that need to be resolved in order to implement solutions at scale across public and private lands.
Post Fire Restoration Symposium

Post Fire Restoration Symposium
This virtual symposium focused on how monitoring and research in the southern Sierra Nevada can support post fire restoration planning and help to inform adaptive management. Topics included treatment effects on wildlife, variable density treatments in plantations, hardwood management, aquatics and meadow restoration. Panel discussions provided the opportunity for collaboration on the implications of the work and how to apply this knowledge to future post fire management. The virtual symposium was held and recorded on July 14, 2022.
Presented by: USDA Forest Service Ecology Program, ACCG, SOFAR, and hosted by the California Fire Science Consortium
Sequoia National Forest Restoring Rough Fire Area With Partners

Sequoia National Forest Restoring Rough Fire Area With Partners
Contractors have begun implementing about 1,340 acres of an approximately 4,900-acre restoration project in the footprint of the 2015 Rough Fire affecting the Kings River drainage in Hume Lake Ranger District. The project is a partnership with the Great Basin Institute and American Forests, with funding from CAL FIRE’s Forest Health Program.
RESOURCES
Drill down into more details from the USFS on the Rough Plantation Restoration and Maintenance Project
Administration Announces Plans for Reforestation, Climate Adaptation

Biden-Harris Administration Announces Plans for Reforestation, Climate Adaptation, including New Resources from Bipartisan Infrastructure Law
On July 2022, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Forest Service announced a nationwide strategy that will address a reforestation backlog of four million acres on national forests and plant more than one billion trees over the next decade. According to USFS Chief Randy Moore, the reforestation strategy will serve as a framework to understand reforestation needs, develop shared priorities with partners, expand reforestation and nursery capacity, and ensure the trees planted grow to support healthy, resilient forests. In addition to the reforestation strategy, Secretary Vilsack announced 13 new USDA agency climate adaptation plans, which outline how each USDA agency will incorporate climate change into their operations and decisions to support communities, agriculture and forests nationwide.
RESOURCES
Camp Cinder

Camp Cinder
CAL FIRE’S summer program, Camp Cinder, inspires young women to join the future of the fire service.
Boggs Mountain Demonstration State Forest Research Video

Boggs Mountain Demonstration State Forest Research Video
Wildfire is increasingly impacting small to medium sized forest landowners. Deciding what to do with their land post-fire can be challenging, which is why CAL FIRE’s Fire and Resource Assessment Program has implemented a long term post-fire reforestation study at Boggs Mountain Demonstration State Forest. The results of this study will help inform landowners about different options for post-fire reforestation. The experiments and research conducted on Demonstration State Forests helps inform management practices for government, nonprofit and private forestland owners. Private forestland ownerships comprise 40% of California’s forestland and are key to sustaining forests for all California.
How is California Saving its Forests?
Can California Forests Be Saved?
April 20, 2022 – KQED, the public TV station in Northern California, produced this excellent video called, appropriately enough, Reforestation. The 9:00 minute long video explains the scientific process that geneticists are using to replant our state’s burnt forests. You’ll see the climbers who collect conifer cones in dizzying footage that shows the lofty efforts that are being made to rejuvenate California’s forests by authorities like CAL FIRE and U.S. Forest Service.