Bohemian Collaborative

In 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, a group of large-parcel landowners and organizations based in OAEC’s Dutch Bill Creek and adjacent watersheds began to meet online about collaborating on various fire and water restoration projects. Coming together over common challenges – from a lack of financial resources, to difficulty finding skilled labor, to the ecological scars left by our region’s history of intensive logging, vineyards, and rangelands – the group also recognized the wealth of shared opportunities and the impact we could have by approaching stewardship from a landscape-scale rather than parcel by parcel.

Since then, this effort has grown and been formalized into the Bohemian Collaborative, a subcommittee of the 501(c)(3) Safer West County. The Collaborative is made up of over 40 large-parcel landowners (~50+ acres) representing nearly 20,000 acres surrounding the watersheds/firesheds of Dutch Bill Creek, Green Valley, Willow Creek, and Salmon Creek. The Collaborative strives to improve the ecological function and health of our diverse vegetation communities, while increasing the resiliency of the adjoining wildland-urban interface (WUI) communities of Graton, Forestville, Guerneville, Monte Rio, Camp Meeker, Occidental, Freestone, Bodega, and Bodega Bay.

Members of the Bohemian Collaborative meet regularly towards identifying shared priorities, pursuing potential grant opportunities, crowdsourcing knowledge, and determining priority projects we can tackle together. A joint Bohemian Collaborative Stewardship Plan is also in the process of being developed in collaboration with Gold Ridge Resource Conservation District to summarize this data into a comprehensive landscape-level plan to help guide future projects and improve the health of our forests, waterways, and overall resilience. By working with other community partners like Cal Fire and our local fire departments and resource agencies, this document will also serve as a Stewardship Plan that complies with State agency regulations, a requirement (and often big hurdle!) for landowners and organizations to pursue public funding programs.