Wildfires are killing California's ancient giants. Can seedlings save the species?

The Potential Operational Delineations (PODs) framework combines analytics and local expertise to assess fire risk by marking out locations on a map where fire can best be stopped. The risk is then used to identify where best to suppress the fire and where it can continue to burn to benefit the environment and prevent future fires. From there, experts decide how to respond to a fire in each section of the map in advance, which can also include prevention tactics.

Prescribed Burn Associations (PBAs) in Oklahoma bring together landowners to share equipment, labor, and expertise needed to conduct prescribed burns. Early evidence of efficacy include restored native plants and improved land health, suggesting the model can help reverse woody encroachment and improve grassland and wildlife habitat on participating properties.

The Wall of Trees initiative in Nigeria's Makoda village created a four-tiered barrier of windbreak, orchard, woodlot, and economic trees that tripled crop yields and provided income opportunities for 200 women, successfully reversing desertification on 15 hectares over two decades.

The Colorado-based mycology center Boulder Mushroom is spreading fungi mycelium — the underground, root-looking part of a mushroom — across forest floors that were thinned to mitigate wildfires. The mushrooms quicken the pace at which sawdust and other potential fire fuel decays and improve soil health.

Auroville is home to foresters, ecologists, and other conservation advocates working on various reforestation efforts like propagating tropical dry evergreen forest species and planting drought-resistant species. Today, community-run nurseries supply about 50,000 saplings a year for tree-planting projects in Auroville. There are also “forest groups” made up of local residents who plant native species, collectively planting more than half a million evergreen saplings of over 200 different species.

Scientists are experimenting with a low-cost way of combatting an invasive species and wildfires. They’re using cattle to graze on cheatgrass, which has spread across the U.S. West, disrupted native plants and animals and become a source of fuel for fires. The cows were able to reduce the grass by an average of more than 60 percent, creating an area that could prevent fires from spreading.

By rewetting part of the Santa Cruz River in Tucson, the city has been able to revitalize an ecosystem that was once thought to be lost. Through collaboration and research, hundreds of species of creatures have returned to the river. This restoration project could serve as a model for other cities that want to help their desert rivers and sustain wildlife habitats.

A collaboration between former adversaries over forest management and preservation in the Sierra National Forest led to a $9 million investment into making 154,000 acres healthier, and able to withstand destruction in one of the largest wildfires in California history. The Creek Fire largely spared land in the Dinkey Landscape Restoration Project, despite severe damage in hundreds of thousands of adjacent acres. Years of strategic tree-thinning and intentionally set small fires proved effective.

Satellite-based forest monitoring, paired with other sophisticated measures of a forest's health, is transforming the speed, precision, and economics of finding and eradicating infestations and pinpointing acreage where preventing wildfires and deforestation will prove most effective. Rather than rely on ground-based, manual surveys of vast tracts, forest managers are refining their ability to observe more useful data from space. As success stories pile up, however, the science still must rely on the political will to enact needed policies for a healthier climate and forests.

Landowners, state employees, environmental groups, and local hunters are working together to protect Hawaii’s forests and drinking water by eradicating invasive plants from the state’s protected forests. By allowing native plants to flourish, these forests could help combat climate change by sequestering carbon and allowing freshwater quivers to recharge with rainfall. Since 2013, the state has built 132 miles of fence to keep grazers away from forests to prevent the spread of seeds of invasive plants. However, this method can be expensive; a 1,400-acre fence cost over a million dollars.