Wildfire Mitigation (old) - McConnell Foundation

Wildfire Mitigation

The McConnell Foundation is supporting communities in our giving area to develop and implement wildfire mitigation projects. Communities in our region are at high risk of potential wildfire impacts due to intensifying extremes. In northern California, recent high-severity wildfire activity is causing significant and long-term damage to natural ecosystems and communities at unprecedented scale and frequency. In a region where ecosystem health is often tied to community resiliency, the Foundation seeks to implement wildfire mitigation projects that will have beneficial outcomes for communities and natural ecosystems. Part of working toward a solution is better understanding of how the change in forest structure over the last century has reduced community and natural resource resiliency in a historically fire adapted ecosystem. Currently forest ecosystems are overgrown compared to pre-European conditions due to a century of fire suppression and other anthropogenic disturbance. Hazardous fuel reduction near communities and habitable structures is one pathway in a more complex system to restore vegetation composition in forests.

Wildland urban interface fuel treatments include reductions in vertical and horizontal continuity of fuels and removing competition from many small, closely-spaced, fire-vulnerable species into a smaller number of resilient larger trees, thereby improving fire resiliency and carbon stocks. The longevity of these measures is improved by increasing the height of live crowns, decreasing crown density and allowing overstory trees to dominate a greater proportion of sites, thereby shading out and controlling understory fuels improving fire resiliency to the forests around vulnerable communities. The fuel treatments will be targeted to reduce fire intensity around communities, reducing potential damage to habitable structures, or reduce the potential for a human caused wildfire to spread from the community into the valuable and biologically diverse forest ecosystem.