Wildfire researchers in San Jose State are studying the impact of the devastating CZU Lightning Complex Fire in the Santa Cruz Mountains and the importance of forest management to protect forests from extreme wildfires.
“San Vicente Redwoods is a pretty epic place,” says Nadia Hamey, Lead Forester and Property Manager at the San Vicente Redwoods.
Hamey remembers all too well when the CZU Lightning Complex Fire tore through her beloved forest, calling it an intense time.
“In some places where there’s been some heavy fire, I think it’s going to take a while for forest to come back,” Hamey said. “There is no other event that would have informed what is happening now.”
Hamey said just six months before the CZU Lightning Complex Fire, they conducted a prescribed burn that ultimately protected that part of the forest.
“So it kind of skipped the prescribed burn footprint, and the Crown Fire continued to burn through the area that was not prescribed to burn,” Hamey said.
The contrast is striking. There is a clear difference where the forest was untouched by wildfires and where the trees are burned and blackened just a few meters away.
“This forest and the community where I live endured the CZU fires, and it was very scary,” said Julia Gaudinski, Associate Director of the San Jose State Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center. “Working here gives me some hope though because, you know, we’re doing work to reduce fuel consumption to keep this Warrenella Road as a fuel break, so there are actions being taken if a fire breaks out here that we can hopefully stop it. “
The Warrenella Fuel Break in the San Vicente Redwoods is Gaudinski’s living science experiment.
“So this is one of the treatments along Warrenella Road here where they have come in and removed the dead trees and left a residue of material that is less than about a foot in diameter,” Gaudinski said.
San Jose State researchers are investigating the impact of a devastating wildfire on a forest, how it affects the soil and the forest’s regrowth and recovery. They study what happens to the forest and especially to the soil when dead trees are burned, felled and chopped or chewed with a machine and then spread in the forest. Their goal is to see how all this affects the health and resilience of the forest.
“We’ve been fighting fires for a long time and that’s caused fuels to build up in our forests, and when you combine that with the increased intensity of firefighting, you get much more extreme fires than these ecosystems are used to. cause more damage than they did in the past,” Gaudinski said.
Gaudinski believes in her team’s research and calls it important and inspiring work.
As she walks through the forest as an ecologist and climate scientist, she says she is in awe of it and wants to do everything she can to protect it and prevent a monstrous CZU Lightning Complex Fire from ever happening here again.
The Warrenella Fuel Break project in the San Vicente Redwoods is an approximately $2 million project funded by the state.
Maria Lee
