Land Director Laura McLendon surveys Big Basin State Park with Rangers after the CZU Fire.

Before the fire was under control, response efforts began. We were joined by Save the Redwoods League to quickly launch the Big Basin Recovery Fund to support critical redwoods restoration and recovery efforts at the park and a Santa Cruz Redwood Restoration Fund to help with redwood restoration efforts in Butano State Park and redwood forests affected throughout the region.

We are extremely grateful for your response. More than  $660,000 was raised to help Big Basin recover from the wildfire. By December, the first $200,000 was disbursed for initial efforts focused on access and safety improvements to remove fallen or “hazard” trees likely to fall harming staff and crews, or other trees along 100 miles of park roads and trails, prepare for winter storms, and begin the long-term planning of reimagining Big Basin Redwoods State Park.

Read more about how the Big Basin Recovery Fund Supports Access and Safety Improvements.

As recovery efforts began at State Parks, we were facing many of the same challenges in our surrounding protected forests alongside Big Basin and Butano State Parks, and at San Vicente Redwoods. 10,916 acres of the more than 11,000 we currently manage were burned by the CZU Lightning Complex Fire.

Eager to aid the fire-adapted redwood forests in their recovery, we redoubled our stewardship efforts to care for the land. We coordinated efforts to clear roadways of dangerous trees, replace important infrastructure, such as culverts, bridges, wildlife monitoring equipment, and gates, and began assessments of the ecological toll the fire might have on the region. Ongoing research will help us and our partners document the ethnobotanical and other effects of the fire on the region’s rich complex of habitats.

With little to no remaining vegetation to help keep the soil from washing away in the winter’s rains, removing debris and repairing infrastructure minimizes potential after effects of fire such as erosion and landslides. Fortunately there were no major rain events this past winter, but low precipitation in California is generating extreme drought conditions.

While many native plants thrive after wildfire, so do opportunistic invasive plants like French broom and yellow star thistle which take advantage of the burned, barren soil. Prior to the fires, and with the help of more than 400 volunteer and intern hours, 30 football fields worth of invasive plants were removed, which will help native fire-adapted species to regrow.

Throughout the winter fern fronds unfurled, redwood trees “fuzzed out” with new green sprouts, and the forests showed other hopeful signs of recovery. Botanical studies are being conducted on the properties to measure the health and recovery of the habitat as well as to search for rare plants like “fire followers,” that can sprout from dormant underground seeds awakened by the fire. In some areas, where the effects of the fire may prove to be too damaging—burning away even fire-adapted plants or leaving behind dangerous chemicals like arsenic—we are sampling soils, reseeding native plants, and planting coast redwood saplings to restore healthy habitat better prepared for climate change and the return of wildfire.

To learn more about rare and interesting plants like “fire followers”, watch Treasure Hunting in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

We cannot predict how rapidly changing and increasingly extreme climate events will impact redwood forests, but we can look back at our resiliency efforts to plan ahead for an uncertain future. Earlier stewardship projects to manage our lands for and with fire helped to slow the spread of fire through our forests—protecting nearby communities.

In previous years we partnered with CalFire and the Amah Mutsun Land Trust to create a shaded fuel break on the edge of San Vicente Redwoods. A prescribed burn reduced dry brush and understory vegetation that can speed a fire along. These fire breaks—strategic gaps created in vegetation to act like speed bumps to fire—likely decreased the heat and speed of the fire at San Vicente Redwoods as it neared neighborhoods close by. This information will help us prepare the forests on our properties to withstand the next disaster, which we must expect and plan for. We are currently working to install new shaded fuel breaks on our properties throughout the region.

Multiple research and monitoring projects are generating new baseline data for understanding how the forests and habitats of the region respond and recover from fire. And by coordinating with regional partners, from California State Parks and the Bureau of Land Management, to Resource Conservation Districts and neighboring property owners, and through the Santa Cruz Stewardship Network, we are supporting each other's efforts to both recover from one fire and prepare for the next.

To learn more about how our properties are managed for and with fire, watch Managing for Wildfire in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Land conservation, especially at the scale critical to safeguarding the Santa Cruz Mountains, relies on a complex array of funding sources and policies to encourage best conservation practices and outcomes. In 2020, key policies were created or reinforced to improve the outlook for conservation in the region. Just weeks before the lightning ignited the CZU fire, the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund became a permanent fixture for helping  purchase natural lands and expand parks, protecting them forever. Protected and connected lands, like those in Butano State Park which was scorched in the CZU Fire, have been expanded with Land and Water Conservation funds. At nearly the same time, California Assembly Bill 3256, which would have provided much needed state funding to help prepare for climate change related disasters including wildfire, was not approved for California’s general election ballot for November. By January, embers reignited in the CZU Fire’s burn area, in what should have been the middle of our rainy season, and mountain communities were being evacuated again because of climate-induced wildfire. Fortunately, nearly a year later, Governor Gavin Newsom signed a robust budget package that includes significant funding for California State Parks and Big Basin, and investments in climate and forest resiliency, and wildfire and drought recovery.

On January 20th, in one of his first acts, President Joe Biden announced the United States would rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement and once again be part of an alliance of nations committed to fighting for solutions to the climate crisis. We hope this marks the beginning of renewed commitment at national, state, and local levels to address the urgency of the climate crisis and enhance the resilience of our natural and human communities.

For us at Sempervirens Fund, that means accelerating the pace and scale of the redwood forests we protect and restore because redwoods are climate change heroes. And although only 5% of these once vast redwood forests are still standing, with protection and stewardship, we’re growing the healthy, resilient, old-growth forests of tomorrow so future generations—of redwoods and people—can thrive.