Midpen gets grant for program to reduce wildfire risk
The Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District scored a big win for its ongoing fire prevention efforts last month.
The agency was awarded a $1.5 million grant by the California Wildlife Conservation Board to help with its new Wildland Fire Resiliency Program along the Los Gatos Creek Watershed.
The Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District has been charged with protecting open and green space in the South Bay since 1972. Fire prevention has always been one of the agency’s aims, but the catastrophic fire seasons in recent years—including the 2020 SCU Lightning Complex fire that affected Santa Clara County—have made risk mitigation a top priority.
According to Leigh Ann Gessner, public affairs specialist for the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District, the agency finalized the Wildland Fire Resiliency Program this summer. The program is multifaceted but overall aims to put preventative measures in place to reduce wildfire risk and to ensure local emergency agencies and the ecosystem itself can respond properly in the event of a wildfire.
“We have always done proactive work to prevent fire,” Gessner said. “Every year, we’re maintaining hundreds of miles of fire roads, fuel brakes, helicopter landing flights, etc. But conditions have been changing in California, so we’re proactively doing more to meet the needs of our situation right now.”
The Wildland Fire Resiliency Program has four components. The first is vegetation management, which focuses on the ecological health of native plants. The agency is also working with local emergency responders to make maps of the preserves that will identify sensitive environmental areas and the best routes to use in the event of a fire.
The third part of the program relies on scientific monitoring, which Gessner said will help the agency ensure its efforts are effective. The fourth component, which is still undergoing the environmental impact review process, is reintroducing prescribed fires into the agency’s land management procedures.
In order to increase its capacity to reach the program’s goals, Gessner said the agency is applying to several grant programs, hiring new staff and entering into partnerships.
The new California Wildlife Conservation Board funds will go to the agency’s vegetation management efforts. These are fire prevention measures focused on making sure the vegetation doesn’t fuel future wildfires and that it can rebound when fires do inevitably occur.
As fog wafts overhead, cyclists ride the Saratoga Gap Trail above Saratoga. The Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District was recently awarded a $1.5 million grant by the California Wildlife Conservation Board to help with its new Wildland Fire Resiliency Program along the Los Gatos Creek Watershed, which includes the Saratoga Gap Preserve.
According to Gessner, vegetation management can take many different forms, including removing brush and dense vegetation under the forest while leaving the canopy intact. This would prevent the vegetation from feeding a fire and allowing it to spread.
“The native plants in California evolved over millennia with fire and can be resilient to it,” Gessner said.
“So really, our focus is to restore the natural ecological functions and have plant communities that are healthy and able to be resilient in the face of fire, which is a fact of life here in California.”
While the agency had vegetation management efforts in place before this new program, agency officials said in a release that this program will increase the efforts by about 600% over the next decade.
The vegetation management efforts will be expansive, spanning 353 acres across numerous open space preserves, including Sierra Azul, Long Ridge, Saratoga Gap and Bear Creek Redwoods.
This California Wildlife Conservation Board grant is not the only cash infusion the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District has received recently. The agency received almost half a million dollars from the California Coastal Conservancy earlier this year to fund vegetation management efforts in San Mateo County.