Healthy Forests = Healthy Rivers

Forests are more connected to our water systems than they may seem. They are vital for ensuring healthy rivers and wildlife habitats.

Forests affect the water cycle by maintaining snowpack, reducing evaporation, and slowing runoff. Layers of the forest canopy, branches, and roots can even store and release water vapor, which contributes to rainfall. Forests serve as natural sponges, collecting and filtering rainfall and snowmelt and releasing it slowly into streams and rivers. When forests are healthy, the entire landscape is more resilient against natural disasters.

As you know, our headwater forests are facing some serious problems due to poor forest management practices of the past, such as unsustainable clear-cutting and decades of fire suppression.

Indigenous peoples have known what forest managers failed to realize until faced with catastrophic wildfires and climate change. Bands of the Miwok, Ahwahneechee, and other tribes have stewarded their ancestral lands for thousands of years and to continue to do so today. The establishment of Federal lands led to the continued forced removal of Indigenous peoples. The prohibition of indigenous cultural burning along with other Forest Service practices threw the forest out of balance.

Incorporating the wisdom and traditional knowledge of the original stewards of the land is a key aspect to building resilience back into our ecosystems.

Repairing the toll that decades of poor forest management have taken requires investment from agencies and institutions. We are proud that many State funding sources, including CalFire, the Wildlife Conservation Board, the Department of Fish & Wildlife, the Sierra Nevada Conservancy, and the Department of Conservation are investing in forest resilience and granted us over $23M to restore the upper Tuolumne Watershed and its headwater forests alongside our partners. This funding helps restore over 11,000 acres of this iconic landscape to improve meadows, streams, forests, and wildlife habitat. This season, we planted 75,000 trees in the Rim Fire Footprint funded by these grants. We are continuing to monitor the tree seedlings as drought sets in and are hopeful that the seedlings will remain resilient to the stress.

The CalFire grant also enabled us to purchase a revolutionary dataset that will allow us to make a plan for the future across hundreds of thousands of acres of the Tuolumne watershed. With funding from the Sierra Nevada Conservancy, we have purchased a drone and cutting-edge software package. From detailed computer models to satellite, laser, and drone technology, this data is changing the way we do business and allowing us to plan our large-scale restoration projects in ways we would have never imagined possible when this work began.

An example of the watershed visualized using Lidar (Light Detection and Ranging) data.