Forest landowners in San Luis Obispo County or any resident interested in oak woodlands resilience can expand their knowledge with the Forest Stewardship Workshop series hosted by the University of California Cooperative Extension.
“We go to any county that has forestland, and that is defined by the Forest Service definition of having at least 10 percent canopy cover. That does include oak woodlands as well,” Forest Stewardship Academic Coordinator Kim Ingram said. “We know that San Luis Obispo [County] has a large oak woodland forest eco type and so we’ve been working with our local offices there.”
From Aug. 27 to Oct. 22, online stewardship workshop classes will help private landowners improve their lands in an ecologically sustainable manner. The sessions will address forest restoration, fuel reduction, permitting, forest ecology and vegetation management, and financial planning and cost-sharing opportunities. On Sept. 21, participants get to go on a field day trip in Cambria where they can connect with local natural resource professionals and work toward creating a forest management plan.
This is the first time the forest stewardship program will be available to SLO County residents. Ingram told New Times that the workshop started as in-person sessions in 2020 in Mendocino County. Once the COVID-19 pandemic hit, UC Cooperative Extension switched to the online version. It offers four to five sessions annually across the state. SLO County will be the 27th cohort since 2020, adding to the 500 Californians who have participated in total so far.
The sessions sprung up from a call in 2019 from the forest landowner education and outreach working group of the California Wildfire & Forest Resilience Task Force.
“It had done some studying and talking with various people in organizations and concluded that there needed to be greater targeted outreach to private forest landowners to help them better manage and steward their forest land,” Ingram said.
UC Cooperative Extension drew from the working group’s goals and set up the workshop series, which are fully funded by Cal Fire. The connector of local issues with UC research, the cooperative extension worked with SLO County’s Cal Fire staff, Cal Poly, and the local offices of the Resource Conservation District and the Natural Resource Conservation Services.
Registration for the workshop costs $60. The cooperative extension will provide materials needed for the once-a-week evening classes. Sign up at ucanr.edu/forestryworskhopregistration.
“Because of the online nature of the course, we also have folks that are from outside the San Luis Obispo [County] area participating and that’s fine because a lot of the information we cover is consistent across California,” Ingram said.
While the target audience is private forest landowners, Ingram added that in the past two years, the workshops drew in an increased number of people looking for professional development who work for nonprofits and other resource groups.
“We have students that are interested in pursuing forestry careers,” Ingram said. “We have folks that manage outdoor camps or folks that are thinking about buying forest land and want to get a better sense of what it is that they are getting into before they purchase.”
At the end of the workshop, participants who attended seven of the nine sessions will be eligible for a free initial site visit with a registered professional forester, a certified range manager, and/or a state certified prescribed-fire burn boss, depending on the goals of their forest management plans. Currently, 100 participants have had such site visits and together they’ve managed roughly 11,000 acres of forested land.
“We also offer a coast fire forestry workshop, and they might go on to attend that,” Ingram said.
Despite the mainly online format of its sessions, the stewardship workshop still provides the gift of companionship to participants.
“We get a lot of participants that come to the workshop that feel like they’re on their own, that they’re the only ones dealing with … these forest health issues,” Ingram said. “They make a lot of connections with other landowners in the area and resource professionals in the area. … We really work with them to understand that, yes, it is a lot of work but there are a lot of things that landowners can do themselves that helps get them on the path to active stewardship.”
Fast fact
• Enter Habitat for Humanity SLO County‘s Re-Store It Challenge to support local affordable housing for families in need. From June 4 to July 31, purchase a $20 ReStore credit and take a piece of furniture to repair from the SLO or Paso Robles ReStore and bring it back to the respective store by July 31 for customer voting. Winners will be announced on Aug. 17. For more info, visit habitatslo.org. Δ
Reach Staff Writer Bulbul Rajagopal at brajagopal@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Jul 11-21, 2024.