The best-laid plans in forest management can go awry. Even controlled burns can have unintended consequences, as happened not long ago in the Ashland Forest Resiliencyproject.
Although a controlled burn stayed within its designated lines, a few big trees that were meant to survive did not.
So project managers took up a new strategy: plant sugar pines. They used to be part of the landscape in the Ashland watershed, and fit the needs of the project--the overall intent of which is to keep catastrophic fire out of the watershed. Don Boucher and Darren Borgias from AFR drop by with news of sugar pines and other developments in the project.