Source – US Forest Service/CFRP
Photo Source – News 13
The Las Conchas Fire around Los Alamos is the largest fire in New Mexico history while the Wallow Fire has the same dubious distinction in Arizona. There is no silver bullet solution to prevent these kinds of unprecedented fires but a new project in northern New Mexico is a step in the right direction. The Forest Guild is working through the successful Collaborative Forest Restoration Program (CFRP) to plan forest restoration across the top priority 10,000 acres in the Rio Trampas watershed.
The Rio Trampas is an on-the-ground example of Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack’s “All-Lands Approach” to forest restoration because it will work across four jurisdictions; the Carson National Forest, Picuris Pueblo, State Land Office of New Mexico, and the Bureau of Land Management. Planning will prioritize areas at risk of severe wildlfire, erosion, and sedimentation. Then treatments will remove young trees, prepare the forest for natural cycle of low intensity surface fire, and reduce the risk of another record breaking fire. The last 100 years of land use change and fire suppression has increased density of younger trees in these forests and greatly increased the risk of larger, more severe fires.
Project Director, Eytan Krasilovsky states, “Severe events such as the recent Las Conchas and Wallow wildfires underscore the need for forest planning and restoration at watershed scales to reduce the risk of uncharacteristic high-severity wildfire. This project brings resources to four jurisdictions to do the costly environmental and cultural resource planning that the agencies don’t have in their budgets – the first step in on-the-ground restoration.”
The Forest Guild will also provide ample opportunities for communities to engage and participate throughout the project. This sort of collaboration has become a necessary part of land management and New Mexico’s CFRP is a model for the rest of the country for participatory forest restoration. The CFRP has been critical to restoring thousands of acres in New Mexico, creating and sustaining hundreds of New Mexican jobs, and enabling land managers and residents to work together and forge greater agreement on the future of our forests.
The funded proposal can be downloaded from the Forest Guild’s website.
The Forest Guild is a national organization of more than 800 foresters, natural resource professionals, and supporters who practice and promote ecologically, economically, and socially responsible forestry as a means of sustaining the integrity of forest ecosystems and the human communities dependent upon them.
