How To Restore Our Forests: Insights from TTCF’s Implementation Partners

Tags: Community, forest health, forests, grantmaking

At the Tahoe Truckee Community Foundation (TTCF), we recognize that unhealthy forests exacerbate risks of catastrophic wildfire. Overcrowded stands of trees, the result of legacies of fire suppression and other ecological disruptions, fuel hotter, faster-moving, and more destructive wildfires. This overcrowding contributes to further ecological degradation as trees, competing with one another for limited resources like water, become more vulnerable to disease and die-off. 

To help address this challenge, TTCF’s Forest Futures program has deployed over $5 million in funding to a suite of forest resilience solutions, with nearly 70 percent of projects directly supporting forest thinning and restoration activities. 

Making a Forest Healthy Again: What Restoration Entails

“The forests of the Sierra Nevada would historically burn at least every 30 years due to lightning strikes or tribal burning practices. This would remove shrubs and small trees, and cycle nutrients to support the growth of large, dominant trees,” said April Shackleford, Forest Fuels Manager for the North Tahoe Fire Protection District. “Fire suppression is needed to keep communities safe, but it creates dangerous conditions in the forest over time.” 

“Our Sierra Nevada mixed-conifer mountain forests are supposed to be dominated by large, well-spaced trees,” added Eric Horntvedt, Wildfire Prevention Manager at the Truckee Fire District, “and the natural maintenance tool should be frequent, low-severity ecological fire.” 

However, forests are currently so overcrowded that letting them burn now can be dangerous – for communities and ecosystems alike. With this, the first step to restore health to local forests means thinning: pulling out dead trees and clearing up the forest understory. 

In the Truckee region alone, our partners have identified over 100,000 acres of forest as immediate priorities for thinning: strategic sites that currently pose large wildfire risks to our communities. “It takes a tremendous amount of work to undo 150+ years of mismanagement in the woods, and we need to work together to actively address forest health and community protection,” said Horntvedt. 

Once forests are thinned, additional maintenance treatments can be better introduced, such as animal grazing, as well as prescribed fire and cultural burning, a time-tested strategy leveraged by the Indigenous inhabitants and ongoing stewards of the Sierra. 

“Land managers today should work to create a forest that looks like it burns on a regular fire return interval to improve fire suppression tactics should we need them,” said Shackleford, “and to promote forest health for cleaner air and water, enhanced recreation and solace for ourselves, and a diverse habitat for wildlife and plants for their intrinsic value.” 

The Phases – and Many Moving Pieces – of Forest Projects

Forest restoration projects typically span multiple years and encompass various moving pieces. First, projects have to sort out permitting: working on necessary environmental surveys, producing documentation, and waiting for approval from state and federal agencies. While recent state and federal orders could expedite these processes, forestry partners still have to factor in significant timelines and costs for environmental compliance. 

Next, projects have to be planned and laid out – with registered professional foresters identifying ecological thinning needs and outlining project steps. Finally, implementation can occur. In this phase, partners have to triage contractors’ availability with weather windows, which can be fairly narrow depending on when snow melts, when the next season’s snow starts, and when soil conditions are dry enough in between to support restoration activities. 

Implementation delays can sometimes increase (ironically) for smaller projects, including many neighborhood and roadside sites prioritized for wildfire mitigation. These projects can be more difficult for contractors to prioritize, as well as relatively costlier. The Olympic Valley Fire Department, for example, is working to drastically thin a 3-acre area of dense lodgepole trees along Olympic Valley Road, a project to which TTCF has contributed funding through its Forest Futures program. 

“This effort will reduce flammable fuels adjacent to the community’s evacuation route, restore conifer encroachment within the meadow, and improve winter safety by reducing icy road and bike path conditions,” said Jessica Asher, Program Manager and Board Secretary of the Olympic Valley Public Service District. 

“The project has been challenging due to limited access windows – the meadow soils stay saturated much of the year, and we want to avoid bike trail closures during peak summer use,” Asher added. “Coordinating contractor schedules during the busy fall season, especially for a small, lower-cost project, adds another layer of complexity.”

TTCF’s Role as a Flexible Funder

TTCF works closely with our on-the-ground collaborators to understand how the work gets done, where it gets held up, and what unmet needs can be better addressed to support progress. Through these partnerships, we have learned the importance of deploying capital towards aspects of projects that are typically harder to fund, like planning and layout. Recognizing that grantees are typically juggling multiple projects across multiple phases and with multiple shifting timelines at once, we also strive to provide funding across a broader portfolio of work, which partners can strategically and nimbly allocate to whatever aspects of projects are most shovel-ready at a given time – ensuring that capital gets put to use as quickly and efficiently as possible. 

“We’re grateful to TTCF for their flexible funding,” added Asher from the Olympic Valley Public Services District. “This has made it possible to move forward this vital work despite these challenges.”

TTCF is also working at a systems level – identifying patterns across various projects to pinpoint strategic interventions that alleviate bottlenecks and accelerate forest restoration and wildfire resilience. For example, TTCF is investing in a suite of regional infrastructure that can process this biomass locally, thereby reducing costs and transportation distances.

“Restoring our forests takes coordination, trust, and timing to get it right,” said Anne Graham, a program coordinator for the National Forest Foundation who oversees projects in the Tahoe region. “TTCF’s Forest Futures’ flexible support helps us respond quickly when the moment is right, so we can keep projects moving and protect the places we all call home. It’s this kind of partnership that makes real progress possible in our communities.”

As we continue to learn, and to strengthen regional capacity and partnerships for this important work, we invite the community to join us. Donate now, attend a Forest salon, or connect with us with ideas for partnerships, projects, and opportunities for collective impact.