FOCUS AREAS
ACTIVE FOREST STEWARDSHIP
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.
Many forested acres in Northern California are dramatically overcrowded and need to be thinned. Additionally, prescribed burning must be reintroduced to our landscape to reduce surface fuels and shift our forests back to more fire-adapted ecosystems. To do so, initial treatments are often required.
During treatments, small diameter trees are most often chipped or burned onsite during fuel load reduction projects but could be utilized in durable wood products.
EDUCATION
We seek to compile resources and educate forest owners, managers and the public about the benefits provided by active forest stewardship. Some of these benefits include: positive 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.