$67M In Grants For Forest Projects: CAL FIRE

EAST BAY — CAL FIRE has awarded $67 million in grants for land management projects intended to restore and maintain healthy forests, conserve working forests, and enhance carbon storage in California. While no specific projects in the East Bay were funded, the area will still benefit from statewide projects.

The projects include thinning dense and degraded forests; reducing hazardous fuel loads to change extreme fire behavior across the landscape; managing for drought, insects and disease; and prescribed burns for ecological restoration.

Approximately 170,000 trees will be planted.

Statewide projects include:

• California Forest Shared Stewardship Support Program — aims to facilitate USFS and CAL FIRE technical support to forest restoration Collaboratives and Implementation Partnerships to increase the pace and scale of forest restoration in California
• California Mobile Biomass Harvesting and Biopower Unit — This project will develop and deploy a mobile woody biomass conversion unit that complements fire reduction efforts. The unit integrates a mill, a rotary inverted gasifier developed at SUNY Cobleskill University, microturbines that produce biopower developed at Scaled Power Incorporated, and life-cycle and economic analysis carried out at Berkeley Economic Advising & Research LLC. The unit will process up to 500 lbs/hr (bone dry) and generate biofuels, biopower and biochar.
• California State Parks Forest Health — State Parks will treat 1,400 acres in 11 separate park districts across California. Treatments will improve stand characteristics and increase biodiversity, thus reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire, increase carbon sequestration and make the forest ecosystem more resilient to climate change. Treatments include forest thinning, vegetation removal, pile and broadcast burning, herbicide use, invasive species removal, pest treatments and biomass reduction via chipping and/or mastication.

The complete list of grants is online.

CAL FIRE will announce an additional $2M in stand-alone research projects in the next two months.

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