Restoration Initiatives
Restoring Fire Adapted Forests
Over the past century, the composition, structure, and function of southwestern forests have changed in unanticipated ways. Modern fire suppression efforts have reduced fire frequency, while creating conditions that favor high-intensity burns atypical in the paleoecological record. In the Southwest, land managers are interested in reducing fire risk and ecological degradation by implementing restoration treatments in progressively larger areas. Although these efforts have accelerated in recent decades, debate continues about how best to restore forests and, at the same time, maintain biodiversity and ecological integrity.
The Kaibab Plateau stands as one of the prime remaining examples of wildland forests in the Southwest. As such, and given its conservation value and symbolic status, it presents a key opportunity for developing, testing, and demonstrating landscape-scale forest restoration and fire management strategies. To help guide forest management, we are developing landscape-scale datasets describing current conditions and potential future conditions across the Plateau under different management scenarios to inform the development of landscape-scale management strategies. We will use these datasets to support forest and fire management planning, including the use of mechanical thinning and prescribed fire. By working closely with the Forest Service, we will reduce the likelihood of destructive wild fire and where they do burn, we will help to implement ecologically appropriate post-fire rehabilitation strategies and monitor the recovery of these systems. To date, we have implemented six specific projects relating to forest restoration issues on the Kaibab Plateau.
