Is your forest or small woodland overgrown or packed with small trees?  Thinning out some of the smaller trees can improve the health and vigor of the remaining trees – and make your forest more fire-resistant too! 

This two day event includes a meeting regarding smoke management issues and a field tour to see the innovative restoration work being accomplished through the Ashland Forest Resiliency Project. There will be opportunities to hear guest speakers and ask and share questions regarding the challenges of conducting prescribed burning restoration work adjacent to communities.

In 2014, a wildfire raced down Oregon Mountain toward the town of Weaverville, in Trinity County. Just on the edge of town, the wildfire hit an area that had been treated with a prescribed burn earlier that year; fire intensities dropped, and crews were able to stop the fire. Join us on April 22 to visit the site and see the area burned by the wildfire and the prescribed burn.

The recent mortality of up to 20% of forests and woodlands in the southwestern United States, along with declining stream flows and projected future water shortages, heightens the need to understand how management practices can enhance forest resilience and functioning under unprecedented scales of drought and wildfire.

Prescribed fire is a beneficial tool for managing rangelands by increasing nutrient cycling and improving forage quality.  Patch burning, the practice of burning smaller patches, can aid in targeted grazing and creating a mosaic of plant communities and structure on your land.

This webinar will feature the work of:

Please join us to learn about fuel hazard reduction treatments and their relationship to fire hazards, chaparral ecology, birds, small mammals, & plant communities; tour a 10-year old fire/fire-surrogate study; and help build a decision support tool that focuses on these key questions: Should we treat or accept fuel hazard?

The field tour will begin and end at Timber Park in Estacada to gather participants and board vans/buses.

Please join us for a webinar to review last year’s fires and look ahead toward conditions for this year. Dr. Zander Evans will present an overview of the 12 largest fires in the Southwest during 2014. He will share summaries of forest types and burn severities for each of the 12 fires.

Are wildland fires good or bad for fish and their aquatic habitat? What kinds of restoration are most beneficial? We'll take an in-depth look into the state of the science, research gaps, and opportunities for future management coordination & priority setting.

Co-sponsered by: Columbia Basin Federal Caucus, Ecotrust