Meadows are vitally important on the landscape.
They’re really keystone habitat for birds and other wildlife as well.
And they’re an important part of this landscape.
Our goal is to restore 30,000 acres of Sierra meadow by 2030, so we’ve got a long way to go.
The meadows on our national forests are vital components of our ecosystems
You can essentially look at a meadow as a giant sponge on the landscape and when you
have a stream or a spring flowing through it, that sponge absorbs water so you can often
have a high water table in these meadows and then as you go into the dry season the meadows
will slowly leech out water downstream and that water will eventually reach
water users well outside of the national forest.
Over the years, both the number and the health of our meadows have declined.
Meadows are just a tiny fraction of the Sierra landscape.
A lot of them are highly degraded.
Quite a few of them were homesteaded long, long ago, so they have a long history of degradation
from all sorts of sources.
Certainly the century of overgrazing out here hammered some of these banks, destabilized them;
the removing of beavers from these areas.
All those things probably contributed to the current condition and are really commonplace
throughout Sierra Nevada meadows, where we think more than fifty percent of our meadows
are in a degraded state right now.
Another factor is the encroachment of conifer trees.
Conifers suck up a ton of water and they end up shading out various riparian and meadow vegetation species
and can also change the soil chemistry in the meadows as well.
One reason for conifer encroachment is fire suppression.
During the last century of formal fire suppression we were really good at our job in putting out wildfires
before they could spread across the landscape. Now we’ve seen this trend
in conifers essentially marching into these meadow areas where they originally weren’t prevalent
because wildfires would come through these areas and end up killing off the smaller saplings.
While fires can help control conifer encroachment, high severity fires can also cause erosion and other issues.
They can essentially sterilize your soils so while a fire might come through a former
meadow and remove conifers from it, you could also potentially lose those native meadow species
and riparian plant species as well.
Low-impact thinning and low-intensity fires are both being used to help slow the spread of young conifers.
Of course the major issue that you have working in meadows is that they're oftentimes very wet areas
where you have a high groundwater table.
So there's a major concern with soil compaction.
What we're trying to do here is minimizing turning on the meadow landscape to reduce
the risk of potentially disturbing your existing meadow vegetation.
Meadows are also being restored with so called plug-and-pond technology which restores the meadow’s function.
You’re basically using the natural ecological processes of how meadows work to restore them.
Meadows are also essential for water storage, which is becoming increasingly important.
The water in the Sierra Nevada makes up a lot of California's water.
And most of that water is not stored in reservoirs; it's stored in snow pack all winter long.
And we lose that snow pack?
We can't solve all that problem by meadow restoration, but we can probably get a long
way towards it.
And we much prefer these nature-based solutions; instead of building more concrete dams we want to use nature.
So we get the reservoir benefits of restoring meadows and all these other ones:
carbon, water and wildlife benefits as well.
I think our best bet with future conditions is to maintain the diversity that we have.
And so if we can improve the mosaic on the landscape, or restore the mosaic on the landscape,
I think that’s going to help our forest withstand changing environment through the future.
We’re not trying to restore something to the way it was before as much as trying
to help it be able to evolve and continue to grow in the future.
The goal is to make the forests more resilient to future change.
Restoration is a moving target, it’s not a point in time and it is mostly in resilience.
We’re trying to do the greatest good for the land and for the resources and we’ve
been approaching landscape management as more of a ecological management.
There’s all levels of restoration, and I think that’s the big deal is to not try
to think of it as going back to a point in time.
We’re trying to help them as they move into the future.