The Ecological Restoration Institute and partners are developing the 2nd Cross-Boundary Landscape Restoration Workshop! Please join a West-wide audience to work on “Adapting to a Climate Altered West;” we are gathering in Ft. Collins May 1–4, 2023. More information can be found here. Join multiple land managers, communities, stakeholders and elected officials to share lessons, learn, and develop solutions for western forest adaptation.
ERI field crews visited Bryce Canyon National Park this fall to assess forest conditions today and in the past. Our crew used US National Park Service forest and fuels monitoring plots to reconstruct historical forest conditions. In addition to traditional field-based methods, we also collected mobile lidar scans (MLS) of the plots to test how efficiently the MLS tool would be at deciphering living and dead tree evidence with pre-fire exclusion characteristics. Continuing on this theme, our staff also tested MLS scans efficiently for understory biomass, compared with traditional clipping, drying and weighing, at a long-term understory monitoring project at the G.A. Pearson Experimental Forest.
Finally, all of the ERI celebrates the signing of the Rim Country EIS, a 1.4-million-acre environmental assessment that completes 2.4 million acres of planned NEPA. ERI has long been a science-provider, collaborative stakeholder, and forest service partner for this analysis. We greatly appreciate the 40+ stakeholders and forest service staff that have worked on this landscape restoration effort.
