CEE Seminar: Warming, Wildfire, Water and the Survival of Mountain Forests in the Western U.S.

Abstract: In a warming climate, mountain forests can expect longer growing seasons, experience higher water demand and suffer hotter dry periods. This can bring greater drought stress and more severe wildfires, and loss of much of our iconic conifer forests. More frequent management interventions to control live biomass and fuel loads can partially mitigate these potentially stand-replacing events and return a beneficial wildfire regime to the forests. Using an ecosystem services framework, we find that in California’s Sierra Nevada, fuel treatments to reduce the severity of wildfire provide fire protection, while also enhancing water supply, reducing smoke-related health concerns, improving habitat and providing other secondary benefits. Given  the urgency of increasing the pace and scale of restoring severely overstocked forests to more sustainable conditions, regional stakeholder partnerships are forming to help plan, finance and carry out fuel treatments on public lands. The aim is to transform these overstocked forests, which are the result of past management practices that suppressed wildfires and prioritized timber harvesting, to multibenefit ecosystems that can be managed using low-severity fire. With treatment costs exceeding $1,000 or even $2.000 per acre in the Sierra Nevada, this is a multibillion-dollar challenge. Recent data and findings confirm the effectiveness of fuel treatments in reducing wildfire severity, providing more water for downstream hydropower and water supply, reducing drought stress, increasing carbon storage, mitigating wildfire-related erosion risk and lowering wildfire risks to other forest ecosystem services. These new data and tools are particularly important in facilitating partnerships and in encouraging greater public investments in landscape restoration.

Bio: Roger Bales is a Distinguished Professor and founding faculty member at UC Merced. He has degrees from Purdue, UC Berkeley and Caltech, and he has been active in water- and climate-related research for over 35 years. His scholarship includes over 200 articles in peer-reviewed journals and proceedings, and more presentations, book chapters and reports. Currently, his work focuses on California’s efforts to build the knowledge base and implement policies that adapt our water supplies, critical ecosystems and economy to the impacts of climate warming. He is a fellow in the American Geophysical Union and other professional societies. He has been a professor at UC Merced since 2003, and an adjunct professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Berkeley since 2013. From 1984 to 2003, he was a professor of hydrology and water resources at the University of Arizona. He has served as director of several multidisciplinary research programs and is currently co-director of the UC Center for Ecosystem Climate Solutions.