Red Barn Event - Active Stewardship
This is a FREE event with a donation basket at the door.
Doors open at 6:30pm for a community social with beer and wine available for purchase. The presentation will start at 7:00pm. Red Barn Events are now hybrid; you may join us in person in the Red Barn or livestream virtually.
Pacific Northwest forests face catastrophic losses from wildfire, drought, extreme temperatures, and insect mortality. This is largely as a result of climate change and historic land management practices. On top of that, these forest ecosystems now face a crisis of biodiversity loss, which threatens their integrity and the services they provide. Family forest landowners own 15% of forested land in Washington - roughly 3.2 million acres - and they can mitigate many of these threats to their forests through active management. Using a private forest in the Teanaway as a case study, it will be outlined the steps that forest landowners can take to create and steward healthy, resilient landscapes that provide benefits for people, wildlife, and the environment. It will be shared what the process is of determining management goals, understanding the current state of a forest, and implementing a variety of tools and techniques to increase tree vigor, provide high quality wildlife habitat, and restore the historic fire regime.
This presentation will be accompanied by a field trip to one of the ponderosa pine dry forest sites that is managed. We will tour the forest which has had a variety of fuels reduction treatments including a prescribed burn in October 2023. Participants will learn the basics of conducting a forest inventory and how stocking density is measured. We will also showcase some examples of wildlife habitat that we have created.
