Field Tours on the North Yuba: Highlighting Collaborative Successes and Landscape Goals

North Yuba field tour at New Bullards Bar. Photo courtesy of Blue Forest.

In early October, SYRCL Watershed Science staff joined landscape restoration partners for two field tours on the North Yuba River watershed. Led by the Tahoe National Forest and Blue Forest respectively, the field tours showcased forest restoration treatments taking place as part of the North Yuba Landscape Resilience Project (“NYLRP” or “Project”).  

The NYLRP is a 275,000-acre forest resilience and fuels reduction project on the North Yuba, primarily located on the Tahoe National Forest. This project was planned and funded by the North Yuba Forest Partnership (“NYFP” or “Partnership”), of which SYRCL is one of nine signatory members*. The Partnership was formalized via a Memorandum of Understanding in 2019, under which all signatories committed to working collaboratively on the design, fundraising, implementation, and monitoring of needed forest restoration work across the full Project area.  

In the spring of 2022, thanks to the committed efforts of the Partnership, the NYLRP was selected for two federal awards that brought significant funding to the landscape, as well as national recognition of the importance of restoring forest resilience to the North Yuba. The Project was designated as one of ten initial priority landscapes under the U.S. Forest Service’s 10-year “Wildfire Crisis Strategy” (WCS)^1,1a, and was shortly after selected as an awardee of the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP)². Both awards guarantee multi-year funding totaling in the tens of millions for the Project and include funds for continued planning, implementing, and monitoring of forest treatments. Received funding from these awards has been obligated both internally at the Tahoe National Forest as well as to NYFP Partners and their contractors, and it has greatly increased the pace and scale at which this Project has progressed. 

Kat Perlman, SYRCL's Forest Health Program Manager. Photo courtesy of Blue Forest.

For the first of SYRCL’s October field tours, Kat Perlman, SYRCL’s Forest Health Program Manager, and Alecia Weisman, SYRCL’s Watershed Science Director, joined staff from the Yuba River Ranger District and Forest Service Washington Office to visit targeted treatment areas across the Project landscape being completed with CFLRP funding. The day began at the Tahoe National Forest Supervisor’s Office in Nevada City where the group met with partners from the National Forest Foundation to discuss implementation challenges, collaborative processes for decision-making, and opportunities opened by being part of the CFLRP network. They also discussed how funding support from CFLRP has allowed the Partnership’s multi-party monitoring team to develop key questions examining the impacts of this work on other forest resources.  

Later that afternoon, the group enjoyed the first rain of the season during a visit to Downieville, where they showcased to the Washington Office representatives the steepness and inaccessibility of the surrounding forested slopes and outlined the challenges of restoration around this vulnerable community. They met with staff from Sierra County, who highlighted the many resources at risk in this area including homes, utility infrastructure, and recreational assets.  

A large slash pile on the North Yuba landscape. Photo courtesy of Blue Forest.

The team ended the outing at Church Meadow off of Gold Lakes Highway, where SYRCL recently collaborated with the National Forest Foundation on removal of encroaching conifers and restoring natural hydrology to this sensitive meadow habitat. Kat and Alecia discussed the ways that SYRCL is linking together various projects across the North Yuba, identifying common themes and overlapping needs between the restoration of various habitats, from forests to meadows to stream channels. It was an invaluable opportunity to meet face to face with Washington Office representatives overseeing the CFLRP program, and to display project progress in action and to share authentically what a difference this award and funding are making on the NYLRP and for the Partnership as a whole. 

Later in the week, Kat ventured again to the North Yuba for a field tour hosted by Blue Forest, a conservation finance organization and another of the signatory members of the North Yuba Forest Partnership with which SYRCL has worked closely for several years. Blue Forest invited investors and funders of their signature Forest Resilience Bond (FRB), an innovative financing mechanism that brings investments from private companies, local utilities, and other agencies to public projects such as the NYLRP. Blue Forest piloted this approach on the “Yuba I” project area in the headwaters of the North Yuba, catalyzing the landscape-scale visions of the North Yuba Forest Partnership³.

Carson Clark, Central Sierra Program Manager with the National Forest Foundation. Photo courtesy of Blue Forest.

For this tour, attendees visited a different project area known as “Yuba II” outside of Camptonville, where a separate Forest Resilience Bond financing 28,000 acres of treatment has been enacted⁴. The National Forest Foundation (NFF) is implementing forest thinning and timber harvest in this area as part of their role as lead implementation partner for the North Yuba Forest Partnership. Tour members were treated to an enlightening talk by NFF staff members Carson Clark and Heidi Goodrich while (safely) witnessing forest thinning in action through observing feller-bunchers moving freshly fallen timber into piles on an impressive log deck just upslope from the gathering.  

Tour stops also included a view of some truly enormous “slash” piles of removed vegetation, presentations from Tahoe National Forest fuels staff, Dr. Roger Bales of UC Merced, and JoAnna Lessard of Yuba Water Agency. Kat represented SYRCL and gave an overview of the roles and responsibilities of the North Yuba Forest Partners, the evolving needs of an active forest collaborative, and the growth that SYRCL’s involvement as key facilitator of the Partnership has brought to our broader Watershed Science team. 

These field tours round out an incredible season of collaborative progress for the North Yuba Forest Partnership and big strides made for the NYLRP. Partners will continue planning and preparing for subsequent Project treatments through the fall and winter. The North Yuba is a truly unique landscape in many regards, and the Partnership has recognized the immense scale, complexity, and needed innovations for this effort to be successful. The urgency of restoring wildfire resilience to the North Yuba River watershed, sandwiched as it is between some of the largest and most destructive fire impacts our state has ever seen, cannot be overstated. The Partners of the NYFP have risen to this challenge and move boldly forward, using these moments of connection in the field to revitalize our spirits and remind ourselves how far we have come together.

Photo courtesy of Blue Forest.

*The nine signatory members on the MOU for the North Yuba Forest Partnership are as follows: The Tahoe National Forest, National Forest Foundation, The Nature Conservancy, Blue Forest, Sierra County, The Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan Tribe, Camptonville Community Partnership, Yuba Water Agency, and the South Yuba River Citizens League 

Reference links: 

1. Confronting the Wildfire Crisis | US Forest Service 

2. Confronting the Wildfire Crisis – PDF  

3. Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program 

4. Yuba I FRB | Blue Forest 

5. Yuba II FRB | Blue Forest 

Original article can found here: https://yubariver.org/posts/field-tours-on-the-north-yuba-highlighting-collaborative-successes-and-landscape-goals/?utm_content=bufferc84b2&utm_medium=social&utm_source=linkedin.com&utm_campaign=buffer