Burns planned for watershed Yuba Project to continue forest health treatments once weather permits
The National Forest Foundation has plans for 2,000 acres of prescribed burns in the North Yuba River watershed in the coming months as part of the ongoing Yuba Project, a massive forest health and fire risk reduction project that has been underway since 2018.
The prescribed burns will take place once weather conditions permit. The Yuba Project calls for ecological restoration treatments across a large area of National Forest land in the Yuba Watershed, and is one piece of a much larger effort – known as the North Yuba Forest Partnership – that is working to plan, analyze, finance, and implement forest restoration across 275,000 acres of the watershed.
Bri Tiffany, California associate for the National Forest
Foundation, said implementing an additional 2,000 acres of prescribed fire on the Yuba Project will help improve the long-term ecological health of the entire North Yuba River watershed.
“While high-severity wildfires
can scorch seed banks and negatively impact forest regeneration, frequent, lowseverity fires are a natural part of the ecosystem and actually encourage new growth of native vegetation,” she said.
The Yuba Water Agency is one of several organizations collaborating on the project, which will see forest health treatments conducted on 7,114 acres of land.
So far, they’ve completed treatments to just over 1,300 acres, said Joanna Lessard, watershed resilience program manager for Yuba Water.
“Yuba Project treatments (and all the treatments planned under the North Yuba Forest Partnership) will enhance watershed health by improving forest health and resilience to changing climatic conditions, reducing surface and ladder fuels (vegetation that enables a fire to climb up from the forest floor into the tree canopies) to a level that would allow safe fire suppression, protect and improve wildlife habitat, and improve soil conditions,” Lessard said.
The watershed benefits from the project, she said, include avoided costs in the millions from reduced risk of catastrophic fire and risk to water infrastructure, water quality and post-fire cleanup of sediment and woody debris inflows; direct water resource benefits from reduced evapotranspiration and increased runoff from a healthier forest; and regional benefits to people and communities in terms of insurability, security, employment opportunities and associated economic benefits.
Other organizations involved in the Yuba
Project include Tahoe National Forest, The Nature Conservancy, South Yuba River Citizens League, Camptonville Community Partnership, Nevada
City Rancheria, Sierra County and Blue Forest Conservation.
The first conservation finance project of its
kind using an innovative financing tool known as Forest Resilience Bonds, the Yuba Project provides $4 million in private capital from four investors to finance the treatments in the project area. The private capital allows for the work to begin immediately and for contractors to be paid within days of invoicing. Then, the beneficiaries of the work, like Yuba Water, pay back the investors based on the realized benefits of the work.
“This approach is facilitating an unprecedented pace of implementation of forest health thinning treatments at this scale that will be completed in just four years over an area that traditionally would have taken more than 10 years to complete,” Lessard said.
The Yuba Project is expected to be completed by 2023.