The OAEC Wildlands Program has been researching and demonstrating various process-based restoration (PBR) techniques at our field campus for over 30 years. As part of our Fuels to Flows Campaign, we bring restoration professionals, practitioners, and agencies together for on-site visits to demonstrate our whole-systems, whole-watershed approach to land management. Visitors can see the adaptive approach of process-based restoration systems in action and their impact on the watershed in this dynamic environment.
Watercourse Restoration Project
We began a new permitting process for forest thinning and gully repair on-site in 2021. Negotiating the “green tape” for these permits, the first in the State for such work, helped create more streamlined pathways for future restoration projects here at OAEC and elsewhere. In 2023, we submitted this monitoring report on OAEC’s Watercourse Restoration Project, including great before-and-after shots of gully stuffing, as part of the watercourse stabilization permit compliance for the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.
The report helps convey the scope and scale of our Fuels to Flows work at the OAEC Demonstration Field Campus and has served as a blueprint for other land managers to attain permits to do watercourse restoration work. We continue to work with the relevant agencies on how best to streamline the permitting of these projects, as they see the positive impacts and relatively low risk of this work. Monte Rio Regional Park was our first major partner to replicate our permits and increase the pace and scale of applying these beneficial practices. This is all key to our Vision & Strategy for change to not only Demonstrate, Educate, and Train, but also critically, to Change the Rules.
Tours and Trainings
OAEC promotes low-tech, process-based restoration techniques through innovative demonstration projects and workforce development trainings with landowners and managers, restoration practitioners, agencies, and organizations. Wildlands Program Director, Brock Dolman, often shares Fuels to Flows strategies such as forest thinning, prescribed grazing and fire, gully stuffing, and more fuel load reduction techniques in our demonstration site with visiting groups.
Home Hardening in the Core Area
Drawing on decades of experience caring for our 80-acre site, we’re now making our campus more fire-resilient through home hardening and defensible space strategies that can reduce wildfire structure loss by up to 52%. With support from CAL FIRE’s Safer West County Defensible Space Incentives Project, we’re creating ember-resistant zones around 15 buildings by removing combustibles, improving materials, and adding fire-safe hardscaping. This work helps us coexist more safely with wildfire and provides a living demonstration of fire adaptation practices.
