In 2009, the Station Fire burned a large portion of the Angeles National Forest.
I knew there was going to be an invasive plant problem, everybody did.
The first thing that I did was like, almost literally just start having a mental breakdown (Laughs) It was like how am I going to tackle this?
Katie VinZant is a botanist and invasive species expert.
You’ve have to, you’ve got to come with that crazy passion about some thing.
All of us have a passion for one thing or another, and plants happen to be mine.
Plant species naturally move and recolonize, but the rate is increasing especially after large fires.
But when it starts doing what we call type-conversion, which is conversion from native habitats to completely non-native, that’s what we want to avoid.
And the thing is, you can’t start when it’s already type-converted. It’s too late.
Through a partnership with the National Forest Foundation and the Coca-Cola company,
the Angeles National Forest is completing a 5-year weed removal project.
We’ve removed 1600 acres of weeds across the forest.
Through supports though Coca-Cola we’ve removed over 500 acres.
And that equals about 15 miles of stream courses that support a lot of native wildlife and are habitat for different native plants too.
So thank you guys very, very much for coming out to help us pull some weeds. We do this almost on a daily basis...
Recently, a group of volunteers from Coca-Cola came up to the Big Tujunga Watershed to learn about the project and to lend a hand.
See, you can bring government together with businesses and with local communities, and make good things happen like this.
We’re addressing riparian restoration, invasive weed control, reforestation of those upper areas where we had trees lost,
to engaging the community in that work and make sure they are connected to their forests back again,
and looking at ways to adapt to climate change as well.
We don’t have funding on our forests to treat invasive plants, bottom line.
So we are totally reliant on outside groups, volunteers, grants.
Those partnerships are key for us, absolutely essential.
So most of what we are doing to be doing is going to be hand pulling.
And then any seeds or flowers you’re going to put that into a garbage bag to prevent the spread of invasives.
Why don’t we just get a chain saw and cut this stuff down.
This is mostly educational.
We can show people a variety of different weeds and it’s mostly an introduction.
So, a lot of educational stuff mostly today.
... when those plants come in, they out-compete the other vegetation. So in this particular case, we want to remove ...
The Angeles National Forest provides about 33% of the water that is provided ...
This area supports 13 to 14 million people in the Los Angeles Country Area ...
Now you’re probably thinking to yourselves, did what I do today really make a difference? Right?
So, this represents a liter.
So the work that we’ve done with the invasives, 2.4 million liters more every year with the work we have done.
A lot of times it’s the little things ...
It is surprising for a lot of people that you think Southern California, LA, and urban and concrete,
and then when you come up here, and you start walking and seeing how beautiful it is back here,
then you start to have this appreciation that other people may not have.
This mountain range in particular, the San Gabriel Mountain Range has over 2000 different plant species and hundreds of wildlife species.
It’s what we call a biodiversity hot-spot.
So we have one of the highest bio-diversities in the continental U.S.
It all comes down to that satisfaction, if at the end of the day you feel like, I made a difference here.
The landscape looks better to me.
Partnerships including those with the Coca-Cola Company and the National Forest Foundation
are increasingly critical to the Forest Service and our restoration activities across the state.