CalFire has awarded the Resource Conservation District of Santa Cruz County $2,736,367.74 for forest treatment and conservation activities.
The agency is working with Santa Cruz Mountain Stewardship Network, leading a collaborative involving Amah Mutsun tribal band, and private landowners to improve forest health and fire resiliency on 506 high-priority acres of state responsibility lands in Santa Cruz County.
Activities include fuel reduction, pest management, reforestation, and research.
The funding is part of $67 million awarded by the state in February to projects statewide to restore and maintain healthy forests.
”We’re really excited,” said Lisa Lurie, executive director of the Resource Conservation District of Santa Cruz County, noting her agency worked with landowners to identify project sites where work could reduce the threat of catastrophic wildfire.
One project will involve creating a shaded fuel break – a buffer for a wildfire — on Last Chance Road north of Davenport near Waddell Creek and Scott Creek. Along the ridgeline, the understory – the vegetation under the forest canopy – will be thinned to prevent from fire spreading
Big Creek Lumber and Sempervirens Fund are the private landowners involved with State Parks.
The other site at San Vicente Redwoods involves Sempervirens Fund, Peninsula Open Space Trust and Save the Redwoods League.
Again, the goal is to strategically remove some of the understory to create a shaded fuel break.
Lurie said the intention is to remove vegetation with a prescribed burn, which will be funded not by this grant, but other funding sources.
The area is “more at risk because of fire suppression,” she said.
The Amah Mutsen Land Trust is a partner on the project and UC Berkeley will provide pre- and post-monitoring.
“This has been such a huge collaborative effort,” Lurie said. ”It takes the diversity of landowners … to assess the risks and see how can we work together.”
Different landowners have different goals and different priorities, she noted, but there is a common goal—“how to we protect our community and our watershed from the threat of wildfire.”
