The French Meadows Forest Restoration Project, an innovative collaboration approved this week, aligns the expertise of the Sierra Nevada Research Institute at UC Merced, the U.S. Forest Service, the Nature Conservancy and other agencies and groups to focus on reducing wildfire risk in a critical municipal watershed.
The project covers 30,000 acres of public and private land west of Lake Tahoe and is a public-private partnership that can serve as a model for increasing the pace and scale of ecologically based forest management and fuels reduction throughout the Sierra Nevada.
The Sierra Nevada Research Institute is leading the project’s research on the link between healthy forested watersheds and water supply.
“UC Merced researchers are developing information on the water-related benefits of forest treatments, which together with the reduced wildfire risk from forest thinning, is essential for developing local partnerships for treatment programs across Sierra Nevada forests,” SNRI Director Professor Roger Bales said.
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