Tending the Land for Fire Resilience – Web Resource
Tending the Land for Fire Resilience in Sonoma County is a website created to support land owners and managers in the planning, decision-making, and implementation of regenerative land stewardship. Tending the Land helps users articulate a set of goals – from wildfire resilience to biodiversity to worker justice – evaluate opportunities and constraints, and then actually do the work with a set of practical guides.
The Tending the Land website was born out of ongoing work through the Resilient Landscapes Coalition, including a workshop series called âBeyond Defensible Space,â which explored wildland fuel management as a necessary co-management strategy alongside defensible space and home hardening in the â100-foot zone.â Through these ongoing collaborations, we and our partners at Sonoma Ecology Center and Pepperwood heard the need for a central hub of information to help land owners and managers, community groups, restoration practitioners and professionals make informed decisions about how to tend the incredibly biodiverse vegetation communities we have here in Sonoma County.
“As a longtime education and demonstration center for regenerative land stewardship, the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center (OAEC) is proud to share this much-needed resource for land owners and managers in Sonoma County seeking to take an active role in tending resilient landscapes. Rich with case studies, ecological principles, and planning resources, Tending the Land offers accessible management strategies that not only reduce wildfire risk, but also provide co-benefits like wildlife habitat, soil health, beauty, and biodiversity.” – Hannah Wilton, Development & Program Manager, Occidental Arts & Ecology Center (OAEC)
Photo credit: Sonoma Ecology Center.
At OAEC, we have long worked to restore (and ârestoryâ) good fire as a necessary keystone process and recognize the importance of mitigating fire risk, especially in the current reality of climate-exacerbated catastrophic wildfire. As a contributor to the Tending the Land website, we hope to expand the discourse around fire and shed light on strategies that offer complementary ecological and social co-benefits – from water retention and carbon sequestration, to regenerative economy and land accessibility.
Tending the Land is a collaboration led by Sonoma Ecology Center, OAEC, and Pepperwood with the support of dozens of other contributors and community partners. Big thanks to our project funders, including: Sonoma Countyâs Vegetation Management Grant Program, Fire Safe Sonoma, the Sierra Club, Redwood Chapter, and a generous anonymous donor.
More Resources:
- Watch Wildlands Program Director, Brock Dolmanâs presentation âBeyond Defensible Space,â explaining how to think through vegetation management decisions through the lens of holistic watershed resiliency.
- Visit Tending the Land’s webpage on Lop & Lay Brush Wattles to read OAEC’s practical DIY primer: how to redistribute woody material from vegetation management on-contour to slow, spread, and sink water in an upland, hillslope context.
- Visit Tending the Land’s webpage on Headcut Gully Stuffing to read OAECâs practical DIY primer: how to strategically reuse biomass from vegetation management to arrest/reduce headcut migration upstream and gullies from incising deeper.
