A year after the Cal-Wood wildfire, land managers ask: What should a healthy forest look like?
Rafael Salgado wants to know how to save half of the forest he manages as executive director of the Cal-Wood Education Center.
The Mexican native has run the camp for more than 20 years, hosting school field trips and families eager to learn about the outdoors. That also meant putting out a small wildfire every few years — but the one that sparked a year ago nearly destroyed his home and place of work.
While proactive forest thinning and savvy firefighting kept the fire away from the center’s buildings, it still covered 600 acres of forest at Cal-Wood, and more than 10,000 acres in Boulder County — the largest ever recorded there. A year later, Salgado is still unsure of what he should do to restore large swaths of forest that burned.
Hart Van Denburg/CPR News“I was asking some experts, ‘Where is the recipe for that? Where can I follow a recipe so that I can actually do that?’ And they told me that they don’t have one yet,” Salgado said in an interview from the Cal-Wood center.
Thanks to research happening at Cal-Wood and other burn scars in Colorado, that recipe could be on its way. Scientists with the Nature Conservancy are working to develop reforestation strategies that work for private landowners, state agencies and the U.S. Forest Service to use.
Their work could help return entire forests to a more natural state after wildfire strikes. Although formal partnerships exist for landowners to share and coordinate their reforestation efforts, each agency is still responsible for its own property.
Hart Van Denburg/CPR News“Completing random acts of restoration doesn’t quite help solve the problem,” said Stefan Reinold, senior forestry resource specialist for Boulder County.