About the Presentation: Increasing extent and frequency of high severity wildfires and other large-scale disturbances pose a significant threat to California’s ecosystems. This is apparent in forest and shrubland landscapes, where departure from natural fire regimes may result in large-scale alteration of terrestrial ecosystems and deterioration in the services they provide. Based on these trends and a broader consideration of sustainability, there is a growing need for a comprehensive, science-based approach to post-fire management. We propose a framework to guide the development of post-fire restoration strategies on the national forests in California. The framework is founded on a set of guiding principles and a five-step process that leads to the development of a restoration portfolio containing a suite of potential postfire restoration actions. The restoration framework can inform future post-fire management, monitoring, and research in burned landscapes of California’s national forests.

About the Speaker: Michelle Coppoletta is currently an ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service in the Sierra Cascade Province, which covers the Modoc, Lassen, and Plumas National Forests.