Identification of effective and scalable forest health treatments for coastal California forest: pre and post fire approaches

This project will assess the effectiveness of forest health treatments for coastal California forests and identify agency characteristics that influence scaling to landscape levels. This work seeks to identify cost-benefit tradeoffs of competing forest health treatments, determine the threat posed by biologically-driven fuels accumulation, assess effectiveness of a set of contrasting forest treatments aimed at controlling fuels and mitigating disease impacts, and identify agency capacity to apply treatments at scale. Specifically this project will assess 1) fuels and forest disease mitigation efficacy; 2)fuels-fire interaction for repeated wildfire in Big Sur and Sonoma Counties, 3) establish base data to evaluate post-fire restoration strategies and 4) characteristics for forest management.