FOCUS AREAS
CARBON & CLIMATE
Healthy, biodiverse, and fire resilient forests are essential to ensure that trees continue to sequester carbon and that their abundant offerings and ecosystem services aren’t lost during wildfire events.
Our forests are dramatically overcrowded and need to be thinned. Prescribed burning must be reintroduced to our landscape to reduce surface fuels and shift our forests back to more fire adapted ecosystems.
Small diameter trees are most often chipped or burned onsite during fuel load reduction projects, releasing carbon into the atmosphere instead of being stored through wood utilization in our homes. Through our work, we will compile the most current research and viable pathways to help stabilize this carbon for the benefit of our forests, communities, and climate.
ECOLOGY
We depend on our forests for fresh air, recreation, erosion control, wood products, healthy watersheds, and so much more. Habitat, biodiversity, soil health, and other ecosystem services also make forests invaluable, but may be overlooked due to the scale and overgrowth percentages present today.
We are working to compile resources on best practices for increasing ecological forest stewardship when undertaking fuel load and fire resilience work. We will compile, and highlight knowledge from, local and regional organizations who have been working to ensure that forest improvement and restoration work is done with ecology of place at the forefront to share with wood products industry professionals, foresters, arborists and forest owners.
EDUCATION
We seek to compile resources and educate forest owners and the public about the benefits provided by ecological forest stewardship. Some of these benefits include: positive climate impacts of healthy forests, advantages of prescribed burning, reforestation considerations and species selection, conservation considerations, importance of closing the forest carbon cycle by increasing wood utilization, and, by highlighting the nonprofit, public and tribal organizations that are making it happen.
WOOD PRODUCTS
California lacks the capacity to process the amount of overgrowth in our forests as articulated well by author Jane Braxton Little in her article titled “Logjam: The Supply Chain Problem That’s Keeping California From Preventing Catastrophic Wildfire.”
In addition to larger trees that are not able to be processed, there is an overabundance of small diameter timber. We believe that these two feedstock sources should be utilized for wood products and the built environment to provide both ecological and economic solutions to addressing overgrowth in our forests.