Nearly seven months since the Park Fire burned almost 430,000 acres across Butte and Tehama counties, the landscape is beginning to recover.
Now, Chico State is using a nearly 8,000 acre property in the burn scar to create a prototype for sustainable wildfire recovery in California.
The Big Chico Creek Ecological Reserve covers a vast swath of land just above the city of Chico. There, students at the university, members of the Mechoopda Indian Tribe and land stewards have worked to create a living classroom.
Eli Goodsell is the executive director of the reserve. He said the Park Fire burned nearly all of the reserve’s infrastructure, including a historic barn and event center, storage buildings and a residence located on the property.
“The most unsettling thing for the first few months being out here was how quiet it was, not hearing the birds, not seeing the wildlife,” Goodsell said.
Returning to a landscape they no longer recognized was hard for everyone at the reserve, and something Goodsell said many residents of Butte County have experience with.
“People spent years and years, blood, sweat and tears out on this property, through this landscape,” Goodsell said. “To see it drastically changed after the fire was really impactful.”
Since then, life has begun returning.
“It really shows not only how resilient these animals are, but also that there's no real plant or animal in the foothills of California that are not a fire adapted species,” Goodsell said. “All these plants and animals know how to live with fire and actually take advantage of it.”
He said the reserve is trying to learn from the native plants and animals how to live well with fire.
Compounding disaster
The reserve’s workers faced many challenges once they were able to return to the burn scar.
The first was that few plants remained across the landscape after the fire.
This lack of vegetation in areas impacted by high intensity wildfires often leaves the land unable to reabsorb water and makes it prone to flash floods and debris flows.
One reason is that burn scars no longer have plants stabilizing the soil, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. With the ground no longer able to absorb moisture in these areas, rain can wash away large areas of land into neighboring waterways and communities.
Lindsay Amundson, the project manager at the reserve, said after the Park Fire, she and her team immediately began preparing for the disaster after the disaster.
“We all came together and came up with a plan to create sediment retention structures and tributaries to Big Chico Creek that would help us hold back that sediment so it didn't just wash out into the creek,” Amundson said.
Sedimentation smothers aquatic ecosystems. Without clean water, fish, birds and other wildlife that rely on waterways for survival will die off.
It was backbreaking work, hauling rocks, downed trees and other burned vegetation into channels and walls to slow down debris flows. Amundson said crews and community partners worked together to build the structures over a few months.
Goodsell said the reserve was able to create just under 2,000 structures to catch sediment before the first major rains of winter hit the North State.
“We were able to capture nearly 60,000 cubic feet of sediment in those structures. They were a huge success,” he said. “Those structures will not only hold that sediment now, but can provide great opportunities for raising our groundwater and keeping Big Chico Creek cooler for longer periods of time, into the summer and into the foreseeable future.”
Another issue that arose on the reserve (quite literally) were budding invasive species.
Amundson said crews had to quickly begin removing invasive species that took advantage of the lack of competition from native plants that were burned in the fire.
“If we didn't manage that at all, then it was going to turn into a giant wall of brush that would be worse for the next fire,” she said. “So we're looking ahead. Asking, ‘how are we going to manage the regrowth of these various species to prevent a major catastrophe wildfire up there again?’”
Preparing for the future
California needs fire. Good fire.
The difference, Goodsell said, is all about intensity. Historically, most of California has a warm, dry climate. This means it does not get enough moisture to break down dead vegetation so instead, healthy fire drives its carbon cycle.
Goodsell said regions with heavy moisture and rain can decompose old vegetation through rot. In contrast, much of California needs fire to help with decomposition.
“What we've seen with 100 plus years of fire suppression is that our forest cannot stay in a healthy balance by just decomposition,” he said. “There's no real plant or animal in the foothills of California that are not a fire adapted species. So all of these plants and animals know how to live with fire and actually take advantage of it.”
Without fire, brush, dead vegetation and overgrown forests create massive fuels for wildfires. These fires burn with such intensity and speed that healthy vegetation is burned along with unhealthy vegetation. They can also move into communities more easily, though overgrown lawns, dead trees and weeds.
Goodsell said California needs to learn how to live with fire, and he wants the reserve to become a leader for other communities
Studies show that controlled burns and land management prevents the devastating wildfires that have plagued the North State in recent years.
Using traditional methods of cultural burning and land management, he said the reserve will be used to study the effects of intensive fire and recovery. Land management such as ensuring California native species have room to thrive, overseeing forest regrowth and creating habitats for biodiversity in line with California’s climate.
“We can really use this watershed as a best practice and as an example of how we can take advantage of these wildfire footprints and really use them to our opportunity to start to steward these landscapes in ways that will hopefully look different, because it'll be more resilient,” Goodsell said.
The reserve won’t be the same. Goodsell said, it will grow back better.
Amundson said recovery doesn’t happen quickly. She said there is a lot of work still to be done, but that working with instead of against fire is the key.
“We are going to have fire on the landscape,” she said. “So how are we going to make it so that instead of being this detrimental thing, it can be a beneficial thing as it traditionally would have been.”
It won’t be easy, Amundson and Goodsell said, but it's a step toward creating a landscape where people and wildlife can safely handle fire, and be better for it.
