The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE) has awarded $9.99 million to small non-industrial forest landowners intended to improve the forest conditions on properties between 3 and 5,000 acres.

CAL FIRE’s Wildfire Resilience Program awarded 3 grants to local and regional partners implementing forest improvement projects on approximately 6,000 acres of private forestlands and technical assistance for landowners across 13 counties.

Forestland planning, forest improvement and fuels reduction treatments funded under these grants are aimed at providing assistance to landowners, strategies for successfully managing forests, contract work to improve forest conditions and fuel reduction treatments.

The three projects CAL FIRE has funded are:

American Forest Foundation - Leaning on the My Sierra Woods model, this project proposes to treat 5,500 acres, with 550 landowners engaged located within Tuolumne Butte, Siskiyou and Plumas Counties. The objective is to concentrate hazardous fuel treatments at sufficient scale and within focused landscapes to moderate fire behavior/size at the scale of the landscape by leveraging American Forest Foundations small landowner network and collaborative that include local Fire Safe Councils, the US Forest Service and local Resource Conservation Districts.

Tahoe Truckee Community Foundation – The Foundation will develop and administer a grant program for private non-industrial landowners to increase regional capacity of landowners able to access funding for fuel reduction, and complete projects with a goal of engaging 150 landowners in the North Tahoe-Truckee region to treat up to 450 acres for fuels reduction.

California Association of Resource Conservation Districts (RCD’s) - This project will support technical assistance to landowners in counties throughout the state in the development of forest management plans, prescribed fire burn plans, fire risk evaluations and project designs, as well as the implementation of fuel reduction projects to increase forest resiliency. This project retains Registered Professional Foresters who can provide broad project support on an as-needed basis, enabling local RCD’s to develop forest management plans and projects at a higher capacity.

Wildfire Resilience block grants are made possible with funding from the Wildfire Resilience package of the Budget Act of 2021 and addresses key actions of the California Wildfire and Forest Resilience Action Plan, a Comprehensive Strategy of the Governor’s Forest Management Task Force. 

(California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection)