 deck now. Here we go. Hello. Welcome friends, we'll get started in just a few minutes as we wait for the room to fill up. Welcome, welcome. And I'm going to put a link in the chat box. This is for today's document. It's an organic document. I'll add to it as the presentation happens. Hello. Hello. Thank you for joining us today. Hello. I've done this 20 million things. You'd think that I would unmute myself by now, right? All right, let's start over. Back in time. Hi everyone. Welcome. I'm Anissa. I'm a librarian here at San Francisco Public Library. I do virtual programming. I do in-person programming. And all of our locations are now open, doing programming, seven days a week, all locations. And you can find us and we'll do lots and lots of stuff. So we have May is AANHPI month, Asian American, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander month. And we have a lot of programs for that. And following that we have summer, which we're super excited about. And I'm sure we'll be joining with our partners at the park services. And keep your ears open for some amazing things. I know what they are, but we're not ready to share. So keep a lookout at your location for special treats all summer with our National Park System soulmates. We want to acknowledge that the library occupies the unceded and ancestral homeland of the raw, nutritious Sholoni people who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. And as uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as First Peoples and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the raw, mutish community. I just want to tell you about some upcoming programs tonight at Medicine for Nightmares. We have author and poets, Jennifer Chang and Diana Coyne Nguyen. And they're going to be talking about the wildness of parenthood and writing. And that's going to be at 7pm. And our partners again, Medicine for Nightmare, the mission's best bookstore. And if you haven't been there, it's beautiful. So come check it out. It's very community oriented. And we'll have books for sale. And we'll have some cheese and some wine, some crackers. So come on out, check out the bookstore, check out the event. Tomorrow in our main library, we have Japanese Superfoods author. And this is going to be on our fifth floor. You can always ask the info desk. I know the main library is big and vast. And you walk in there and you're just like, wait, where do I go? So don't hesitate to ask us. I'm super excited. If you are from San Francisco, then you probably know Annie Sprinkle and her partner Beth Stevens. And this is going to be our second annual Earth Day Eco-Sexual Walking Tour. And we're going to go walk through Bernal Heights and go up to Holly Park. And Annie and Beth are both Eco-Sexuals. They love Earth. They have an Earth Lab and their residents of Bernal Heights. So they know everybody there. And it is a super fun tour. Come out next Saturday, the 22nd on Earth Day. We're going to meet in front of the Bernal Heights Library and it will be super fun. I promise it will not disappoint. And it's acceptable for all ages. It's an accessible park. There are some stairs. And then if you have been up there on the hill, you know, it can get windy. So bring layers, as usual, in San Francisco. So I did want to say one other event that's coming up that I don't have a slide for is the Amazing Segurite Land Trust, an all-women-led organization out of the East Bay. We have them on a virtual library event, but you can also pop into the Excelsior branch if you want to watch it live via Zoom. They'll have it set up for their program room. And our library in there will be in conversation with none other than Carina Gould, who is a just amazing matriarch. So please come check that out. And today we're here to learn about the different types of San Francisco Bay Area and Marin Regional Forest Health and Strategy and why resilient forests are important to a healthy ecosystem and community. And it is Climate Action Month. And this is why we're so excited to have Danny Franco from the Parks Conservatory joining us today. And I'm going to stop sharing. You're welcome to use the chat or the Q&A at any time, and we'll keep it flowing like that. Everyone, please welcome Danny. Hi, everyone. I'm going to get my screen share going. Let me know when you can see those slides. We're good to go. Awesome. Cool. Thanks for the introduction. My name is Danny Franco. I do work for the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy. We are part of the One Tam Collaborative, which is a collaborative of four land managing agencies based in Marin County. And I'll talk to you a little bit more about that in a second, give you some background on the collaborative. Today I'm here to share about some work that I've been doing for the past three years that's just wrapping up. So I have a new slide deck to share with you all. So bear with me as I work through it and definitely put questions in the chat. I would love to engage with you all and answer your questions. I hope that this topic is compelling for you. And my presentation is not too technical, but all feedback is always welcome. So thank you in advance for your honest feedback and good questions today. Before I get started, I do want to also just acknowledge that One Tam and the work that happens in Marin County under the One Tam umbrella is on Coast Mewakland. So just acknowledging that the Forest Health Strategy has tried to integrate Coast Mewak perspectives and we have worked in partnership with the Federated Indians of Grant and Rancheria who are the representatives of Coast Mewak and Southern Pomo in Marin and Sonoma counties. Unfortunately, the tribe is not here today. And most of what I'll be presenting on is from a Western academic perspective. So that's a limitation really and and doesn't include a lot of the traditional tribal knowledge and information that the tribe holds, some of which is included in our strategic planning document. So just holding some space for the Coast Mewak people in their perspective, even though they're not here today. So with that, I'll get started. Just a quick outline of what I'm going to talk and share with you about the Marin Regional Forest Health Strategy. I will start with just some background on why we took on the strategic planning effort. And I'll do my best to make it relevant to you all, whether you're in San Francisco or Castro Valley or somewhere else. I think a lot of these themes are relevant anywhere where there's forests. I'll give you some insight into the process that we went through, really just a high level overview of the process that we undertook as part of our strategic planning effort. I'll spend a good amount of time sharing on key findings. I think there's a lot to share there. And so I'll try to kind of keep my facts and figures at a relatively high level. But yeah, I think that you'll find it really interesting what we've discovered about the health of forests in our region, specifically in Marin County and what's impacting those. We'll talk about the distribution of forests and forest types. I'll touch on climate change and what the anticipated changes in climate may mean for forests in our region. I'll talk about the impact of fire exclusion. And I'll define that for you. So hang tight. And we'll talk about impact of forest disease. And then I'll end with just kind of what's next steps for us. And I'll include some information about how you could get involved or learn more about this work. So starting with just some background of the why and the what of healthy forests. So forests provide forests and the natural processes that take place within them provide benefits for all living creatures. In Marin County, there are 24 distinct forest types. They include conifer types such as coast redwood and Douglas fir oak woodland and grassland savannas evergreen hardwoods like pacific madrone and fire dependent forests like stands of bishop pine. Forest ecosystems provide habitat for wildlife such as bats, salmon, and in this picture northern spotted owls. It's looking very cute. A mama howl and her baby. And so much more, right? The forests are just so rich with wildlife and biodiversity. Another interesting fact in Marin is that three quarters of Marin's water comes from the heavily forested Mount Tamalpias watershed. So Mount Tamalpias is the tallest peak in Marin County and the water district up there has most of the water. Three quarters of the water from Marin County comes from Mount Tam. Without healthy and resilient forests, Marin's water quality and quantity is vulnerable to threats like erosion and sedimentation. So forests already providing so much for the humans in that space. Trees breathe in carbon dioxide, which is a greenhouse gas that traps heat and contributes to climate change. Trees breathe out the oxygen that humans need. Forests store carbon in their biomass, which can get released in the event of a high severity wildfire, which just adds more carbon dioxide to the air contributing to climate change. So we need healthy, resilient forests to help us manage our greenhouse gas emissions and to limit the impacts of climate change. Lastly, but very importantly, the forested parklands and protected open spaces in Marin provide people with opportunities to get outdoors and exercise. Those are activities that are healthy for the body and the mind. These areas also draw millions of visitors each year to Marin County, which generates revenue for local government and businesses and creates jobs. Those are just some of the things that forests provide. So a little bit more background now on the One Tam partnership. That's the group that I worked with to develop this strategy and do this deep dive on forest health in Marin County. The One Tam collaborative is made up, as I mentioned at the top of the four land managing agencies that all manage a piece of Mount Tamalpias in Marin County, going clockwise. That's the National Park Service, Marin Municipal Water District, California State Parks, Marin County Parks, and then lastly, the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy. That's my employer. We're the nonprofit member of this collaborative. The collaborative was established in 2014 and was established to build on the unique talents and strengths of each partner agency. The partnership provides a platform to work collaboratively and across jurisdictional boundaries for the benefit of community and the environment. And we do lots of fun stuff. We've got links to our website in this PowerPoint, which we can share after the presentation and make available online. Definitely encourage you to check out our website, lots of events and things that you can participate in both virtually and in person. Sticking with background for just a little bit more. I want to always start my introduction to this forest health work that we've been doing in Marin with a different report called Measuring the Health of the Mountain, which was one of the initial, was one of the first initiatives that the One Tam collaborative took on after being established in 2014. The peak health report was important because it established baseline conditions for the health of natural resources on Mount Tamalpias. They did this by working with scientists and community and land managers to do kind of a deep dive on all of the available data around key ecological communities, wildlife species, vegetation types on the mountain to really try and assess, you know, what's going on. The peak health report highlighted the need to work with partners to address threats to forest ecosystem function, including introduced weeds, plant diseases, and fire exclusion, and the need for more data at the countywide scale. So countywide spatial vegetation data was something that was highlighted in this report as a data gap as a need. So a key takeaway from this report was that forests in Marin can benefit from active management, so more of a hands-on stewardship focused approach. Big picture questions like how do we approach this challenge of managing forests and where should partners focus management actions, where and across the vast landscape, right, can we focus our precious time. And questions like what does the data and science say, all of that underscored the need for us to take on this strategic planning effort. So staying with background, and I won't read through all of this slide, but I think it's just important to kind of provide some statewide context for this initiative. Funding for this sort came from California climate investments. So the state has this cap and trade program that provides funding that will, for work, that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions and strengthen the economy and improve public health and the environment. From that investment fund that's at the state level, one of the state agencies that helps manage forests, the California Natural Resources Agency, had developed a program that really focused on providing funds for the planning and implementation of projects to improve forest health. That's what all of that says. And you can read it on your own. Later on, if you're interested in all of these links, we'll take you to more information about those statewide programs. And then lastly, the California State Coastal Conservancy got a chunk of this funds and spread it around the Bay Area. So we're one of four, one TAM and the Parks Conservancy are one of four sub grantees under this program to fund various forest health and fuels reduction projects in East Bay. Someone typed Castro Valley earlier into the chat. So we do have some East Bay people. I'm talking to you from Oakland today. So East Bay Regional Parks got some of that funding, the Santa Cruz RCD, and of course, one TAM. Okay, so that's it on background. I'll tell you a little bit more now about the process that we went through to develop this strategic plan. First, we started with developing goals for the health and resilience of key forest types to protect or enhance ecosystem services like clean water, carbon sequestration and wildlife habitat, all of those benefits that I talked about in the introduction. So you don't have to understand this big complicated graphic. It's really just meant to underscore that we went through a really long process with our partners engaging in conversation to really break down how forests work and where there might be ecological stressors and threats. So using that vegetation map that was a data gap identified in the peak health report, we worked to identify the distribution of key forest types across Marin County. So this is a spatial map of all of the different vegetation communities in Marin. I think there's like 100 different vegetation communities and land cover classes in this map. This is the distribution of the five key forest types in Marin County from that map. The five key forest types are coast redwood, Douglas fir forest, open canopy oak woodlands, Sargent cypress, which is a kind of a pygmy forest that grows on serpentine soils. And then Bishop pine, which is kind of concentrated up here by Tamales Bay on the Point Reyes Peninsula in Marin County. Oh, there you might see my cursor now. Bishop pine up here. With this data, we work to quantify and locate threats to forest health and resilience. And I'll dig into these results a little bit more in subsequent slides. And then we created a framework for identifying priority projects and various treatment approaches. So like I said at the beginning, we really, we only have precious so much precious time and resources to work on forest health. And so we really wanted to provide our partner agencies a framework for, you know, prioritizing that precious time and money for where they can best focus their work to have the greatest impact. And lastly, the Forest Health Strategy kind of describes methods for monitoring treatment outcomes and landscape changes. So kind of create that feedback loop so that we can learn from the projects that we implement. Okay, here's a little bit of info, more info on forest distribution. So just some fun facts about forests in Marin. There are 118,000 acres of forest in Woodland in Marin County. That's equivalent to an area of 184 square miles, or four times the size of all of San Francisco. So if you took all of San Francisco City County, and you painted it with trees four times over, that's how much forest we have in Marin. So forest cover, you know, a third of all the land in Marin County, lots of forested lands. The one team partners, plus Point Reyes National Seashore, which is the National Park Service, manages about half of all of the native forests in Marin, so about 60,000 acres. This represents a really important opportunity to address threats to forest health and increase forest resilience at landscape scale, right? All of that forested land that's managed by our partners comes with a lot of responsibility. But it means that our partners are in a really great position to do good work, to increase the resilience and health of forests. And this is important. I won't take you all the way through this table. It's really meant to underscore that the different types of forests and the conditions are not uniform across the landscape. And so that collaboration is really key to maximizing the impact of our collective work. Just for a quick example, you know, most of the hardwoods in the county fall on county parks lands, right? Like most of the evergreen and deciduous hardwoods are on county parks lands that are protected, while most of the coast redwood forests are on Marin waterlands. That's the water district lands. And so, you know, working together, we can kind of improve the health of these different forest types, even though they may not all fall within one partner's lands. So let's talk about climate change a little bit with respect to this work. By 2100 average temperatures in the Bay Area will likely rise by 1.7 to 2.2 degrees Celsius, possibly as much as 4.4 degrees Celsius, depending on the future greenhouse gas emissions. So and just as a reminder, one degree Fahrenheit is equal to 1.8 degrees Celsius. So that's actually higher, right? It's more in terms of Fahrenheit. Vegetation can be becoming incompatible with extremes of heat and drought. The Bay Area's future climate could be less suitable for evergreen conifer forests, such as coast redwood, and more favorable for hotter, drier, adapted vegetation, such as chaparral and grasslands. So climate change is already increasing the frequency and severity of fires, as we know well here in the Bay Area. And as I mentioned previously, those do result in carbon emissions, further contributing to climate change. Management, including the use of beneficial fire, and I'll talk about what that means in a little bit, but you probably have already heard of prescribed fire. Management may reduce the long-term carbon loss and accelerate carbon sequestration by moving towards larger, more mature, more fire resilient forests, and so bigger trees able to withstand wildfire, survive wildfire. Longer-lived trees like coast redwood may not be able to reach equilibrium with new climate conditions quickly enough to keep up with the pace of a changing climate and may be vulnerable to transition in the event of a disturbance due to vegetation climate mismatch. So that's kind of a complicated way of saying that if you have a disturbance like a wildfire, typically a forest would be able to recover from that experience. Some of you may have heard about the wildfires down in Big Basin in 2020 that impacted coast redwood forests down there. The concern among scientists is that if the climate gets so out of sync with what the vegetation types or the forest types are used to have evolved to live in, when you get that big wildfire that comes through and damages a forest, the forest might not come back the same. It might come back a different forest type or not a forest at all because the conditions no longer are suitable for that particular forest type. So here's a quick map that's got lots of detail but it just kind of underscores this basic concept here that currently we have this distribution of forests that I'd shared about previously in Marin County and elsewhere in the Bay Area and depending on which climate change scenario manifests over the next 60 years, whether we get a hotter, drier scenario or a hotter, wetter scenario and these are average temperatures. So seven degrees hotter on average and then maybe wetter which feels true this year or drier can have a change in sort of the composition and distribution of forested types across the landscape. Let's talk about fire exclusion which has some intersection with the legacy of colonization and the history of Coast Meawock people in this landscape in Marin County. So the term fire exclusion includes both modern fire suppression, so that's like wildland firefighting and the interruption of Coast Meawock burning due to European colonization. Without fire the landscape changes significantly. As I mentioned at the outset all the land in what is now known as Marin County is Coast Meawock land. This is explored in a whole chapter of the Forest Health Strategy. It's the third chapter Indigenous Stewardship and Tribal Partnership. By design California Native Americans including the Coast Meawock created cultural landscapes with fire where grassland and tano groves thrived in a region naturally dominated by coniferous forests. So Coast Meawock people tend the land to cultivate different vegetation types for different uses from food sources to basketry to tools to creating better hunting or gathering spaces and one of the tools that they used for millennia to to steward the landscape is fire. That fire had an impact on the evolution of the vegetation communities and the way that we see vegetation communities represented on the landscape. Indigenous Stewardship of Conifer Forest especially the use of fire to thin and open the tall dense canopy allows associated species like tan oak hazelnut huckleberries to thrive and creates much more food habitat for humans and animals in areas that would otherwise become like a food desert if left untended. Many plants in Marin County are adapted to disturbance regimes such as fire and in some cases including sergeant cypress the the pygmy cypress that I mentioned and bishop pine forests up by tamales bay are fire dependent on fire for regeneration. So without fire some forest species like bishop pine sergeant cypress and other vegetation communities could eventually disappear from the landscape. So this map is a map of Coast Meawock settlements. It's from an ethnography by Collier and Thalman. And you know I wish the tribe were here today to share more about this but we're thankful that we were able to collaborate with a tribe on a chapter in the forest health strategy which daylight some of that indigenous knowledge and stewardship practices that I touched on in this slide. So let's talk a little bit more about these impacts of fire exclusion and both you know both putting out of naturally occurring wildfires and also the interruption of of Coast Meawock burning. Fire exclusion produces changes in the fuel structure forest structure and floristic composition so for example just closing the canopy and a shift to more shade tolerant vegetation species within especially within coast redwood and Douglas fir forests. So fire is an important driver for structural and floristic heterogeneity right biodiversity and fire are linked in the absence of fire Douglas fir forest is expanding into grasslands shrublands oak woodland habitats reducing the biological diversity in these areas. So what that really means is that Douglas fir unlike coast redwood is not as resilient to fire it sort of it dies when it's exposed to high intensity heat and so without that those naturally occurring fires on the landscape the Douglas fir is expanding and replacing other vegetation communities. The overall trend in Marin is one of increasing fire return intervals and decreasing wildfire extent. So increasing fire return intervals means more time between fires and decreasing extent means smaller fires. The fire return intervals so the time between fires have really increased dramatically between 1860 and the 1990s rising from approximately 10 years to fire every 10 years to fire every 38 years or more and this graph just represents that that trend at the same time that average acres burned per year has significantly decreased right shrinking fire extent falling from an average of 1% of the total county area something like 4,000 acres annually between 1852 and 1900 to now just 0.1% since 1960 right so here's 1960 so we're getting you know 400 to 500 acres per year on average rather than 4,000 it's shrinking fire extent. It should be noted that the fire return intervals prior to colonization and euro-american record keeping were were highly variable and while some areas may have experienced more fire frequency as a result of coast me walk burning fire return intervals of several hundred years have been documented particularly in music areas so that music means wet right so in wet areas you may have had hundreds of years without fire so it's you know highly variable depending on where you're talking about on the landscape but the big takeaway is that no fire is not good for vegetation communities and really is a legacy of colonization right so let's shift gears from the impacts of fire explosion to talking about tree mortality and impacts from forest disease or forest pathogens many of you may have heard of sudden oak death sudden oak death or is caused by this pathogen the latin word is phytophthora remorum the this introduced pathogen causes sudden oak death that was first documented in the united states on marine in marine county on marine municipal water district and state parklands in 1995 vegetation mapping completed by the water district and their consultant AIS I should spell that out aerial information systems between 2004 and 2009 tracked this rapid spread of sudden oak death and the related tree mortality on mount tamal pious watershed lands and in 2014 they updated that that study and found that over 90 of oak woodlands within the study area were affected by this disease along with 84 of all forested areas so mortality and the impacts of this pathogen were detected across all of the key forest types we that we analyzed in the forest health strategy these alter the fuel arrangements the structure and the composition of affected forest so this map is sort of a you know a heat map showing where we have concentrated areas of canopy mortality in forested lands across marine county we found a substantial portion of native forest have a little bit to medium amount of canopy mortality that's 13,000 impacted acres and then an additional 5,000 acres or five percent of all forests had really high levels relatively high levels of mortality in 2018 this analysis has some limitations it's limited to mortality that we can see in the forest canopy using aerial imagery so it probably under represents the extent of pathogen impacts in the understory particularly in areas where resprouting sudden oak death affected tan oaks sort of have this cycle where they succumb to pathogen impacts and then sort of resprout and that it's like a cycle of kind of growth and decline and we're not able to really see that using aerial imagery so this result is you know a very conservative or probably a on the low side of what the actual impacts of pathogens are on the landscape in marine sticking with mortality and forest pathogens for one more slide to talk about mortality in bishop pine forests which is related to a different disease pitch pine canker disease which is caused by the the pathogen fusarium circunatum this mortality could also be connected to another pathogen called western gall rust which really affects late zero or old growth like 80 to 100 year old bishop pine trees and it could be some just natural die off of the trees as well it's hard to tell what the cause of the mortality is just using aerial imagery analysis but there's definitely something going on in the bishop pine forests and that's what this map really shows is like all this bright red over here our bishop pine it could also be the hardwood tree species that are susceptible to sudden oak death the other pathogen I mentioned especially tan oak or coast live oak they could be included in some of this mapped mortality in these bishop pine areas so you can't really tell the exact species of the affected tree by looking at aerial imagery so but we know that there's something going on here it's affecting both bishop pines and probably the oaks in that area as well then looking at coast redwood and Douglas fir forests and I'll just toggle back and forth real quick so you can see the change in the map this is the bishop pine forests this is the Douglas fir and coast redwood forests so the canopy mortality in these forests related to pathogen impacts to those hardwood associates of coast redwood and Douglas fir so it's not the coast redwood and Douglas fir themselves that are showing disease and have you know foliage that's dying but really the hardwood kind of components of these forests pathogen induced decline of the common associates of coast redwood and Douglas fir again such as tan oak pacific madrone there's another pathogen out there in the landscape called phytophthora synomomy which has also been detected on marine waters watershed lands on mount tam and it can cause hardwood tree decline in mortality lastly on mortality and pathogen impacts canopy mortality was mapped across all of the open canopy oak woodland types and this is really interesting to just see the different distribution of different forest types again I just went backwards to show you on this map the distribution of coast redwood and Douglas fir kind of in the central and western parts of marine and then these are all the oak woodlands right they like that drier habitat so they're on the eastern side of the county we also found mortality in those forests in woodlands it was mapped across all the different types of oaks but was higher in stands dominated by species that we know are affected by sudden oak death those include coast live oak california black oak and canyon live oak as well as hardwood associates of those species again tan oak being really susceptible to that sudden oak death okay we're going to move to and I only have a few more slides so I hope that people have questions there are key findings on invasive plants so we didn't have enough data at the county wide scale to to assess the presence or absence of non-native invasive species in the understory of forests as kind of a metric for assessing forest health at the county wide scale so it again it's really hard to kind of using aerial imagery see what's underneath the trees and what species of weeds might be there however our our fine scale vegetation map that we developed after the peak health report that county wide spatial data is still a useful data set for highlighting the distribution of non-native invasive trees and shrubs at the landscape scale in marine so this just shows you kind of some of the weeds that were mapped as part of this work in southern marine the ability of non-native invasive species to reduce biological diversity degrade habitat coupled with evidence that some types such as eucalyptus can contribute to fuel conditions that are more commonly associated with hazardous wildfire behavior makes a pretty compelling case for active management to protect and increase forest resilience and ecological function wherever we can so our partners do a lot of invasive plant management so that you know the efforts that that come out of the forest health strategy are largely you know seek to leverage the ongoing work of one team and our partners on invasive plant monitoring and management this includes early detection rapid response and invasive plant monitoring and management so early detection just means finding weeds before they become really widespread and difficult and expensive to control so we have really good botanists out there that do surveys looking for new infestations of newly introduced weeds which is a much more cost effective way to try and manage the problem with the spread of invasive plants. Okay second to last slide next steps for our work I just want to center that you know the one team partners should build and strengthen relationships with the federated Indians of Gratton Rancheria to integrate cost me walk knowledge and perspective into the study use and management of forests that are of interest to the tribe we started that process by including the tribe and development of the forest health strategy and having Dr. Peter Nelson who's both a cost me walk tribal citizen as well as an associate professor at University of Berkeley write this chapter on indigenous stewardship and tribal partnership but that's just a first step and we know that as work kind of comes out of the forest health strategy we need to continue to build that relationship with the tribe and involve them on decisions and planning for forest health in the future. We also want to collaborate on strengthening the data collection and evaluation of forest health as part of the projects that we advance field based inventories and community science initiatives such as marine wildlife watch one times rare plant program or bat monitoring program and others we want to develop coordinated county wide treatment track tracking and because that's that feedback loop that I mentioned it can be used to measure project outcomes and inform future management so I put this link in here because this is such a cool initiative the marine wildfire picture index project now called marine wildlife watch you know you all can go on here and look at what the results of an array of camera traps have captured across marine county to document wildlife occurrences it is so fun to go through and look at the different pictures of you know skunks and deer and coyotes and foxes and and so much more so it's a great initiative and we think really you know harnessing that to kind of track changes in forest over time is a really smart move and then lastly and importantly the one team partners will continue to work together to advance opportunities to fundraise for a plan develop implement projects and programs to increase forest health and resilience in marine county as outlined in the forest health strategy this includes partnering across jurisdictional boundaries collaborating with the marine wildfire prevention authority and other fire departments in marine county to expand the use of beneficial fire in marine county and I guess I didn't I didn't I didn't have a bullet to talk about beneficial fire but now we talked about the impacts of fire exclusion the elimination of fire from the landscape through cultural burning and also naturally occurring wildfire so that you know the one obvious tool in the toolbox is to get good fire beneficial fire back on the landscape through either through prescribed fire so intentional intentionally putting fire on the ground to get those benefits or working with the tribe to do cultural burning and both of those things should be on the table and that's one of our key findings I put this graphic on here to kind of give you a sense of what it means to increase resilience we talked a little bit about you know resilience as a concept but I think you know this really hits home for me in the green you have a healthy forest a healthy forest has high resilience and this like kind of well this bucket with with this little peak here is really meant to underscore that there's like a tipping point right so down here this like this healthy forest has high resilience it's like deep in this well it's able to withstand you know different shocks we talked about you know a disturbance like a major wildfire coming through but the forest is able to naturally regenerate because it's healthy right so that's high resilience then as tree stress kind of these stressors the things I talked about pathogens fire exclusion non-native and basic plants those start to kind of affect forest health and the increase in area the resilience of the forest moves from this high resilience state to a high or low kind of the resilience is affected right and this tipping point could be reached at which point you get a change right so you know a very unhealthy forest has low resilience this is pretty intuitive I know but you know just kind of I think this graphic just really unders underscores that what we're trying to do by addressing the the impacts of these threats and stressors to forest health is really is to keep the the resilience high and wherever we can so a shorter way of saying that is the resilience is the capacity of systems to absorb or recover from disturbance while undergoing change to to retain desired ecosystem services and functions within a mosaic of forest types those ecosystem services that we talked about at the beginning are things like recreation opportunities clean air clean water cultural values all the all that the forest provide wildlife habitat so we want to retain those services by by addressing threats to forest health and keeping these forest systems resilient recognizing that change is a natural part of systems so last slide ways to get involved and again these these slides will be made available to all of you on the San Francisco Public Library's website and so these links are active and you'll be able to use them when the forest health strategy is published later this month you can just access it yourself and look at the documents we'll have a link and that's the link where they'll be we're going to have a tour on May 6th a forest health tour for those of you that can make it out to Lake Lagunitas on Mount Tamalpias that's on Mount Tamalpias watershed lands I'll be there giving a similar talk but doing it while we can look at trees together that's part of the one team science summit series we have a June 21st summer solstice forest health tour plan that's for one team members one team is a is a we're a membership agency right like you can you can subscribe and become a member there's different levels of membership and then you get to come to some events like this so if you have if you have some extra money and want to become a member anyone can become a member weekends in June we're going to have this cool Tam van we call it it's our mobile trailhead it'll be stationed all June at Lake Lagunitas on Mount Tamalpias and there'll be some cool programming associated with forest health self-guided tour things like that so if you can't come to the June 21st that's okay you could just go out on your own one weekend to mount Tam Lake Lagunitas and find the Tam van and engage with us that way and as I mentioned at the outset we do have a calendar that hosts lots of volunteer opportunities lists other events if you want to get out and pull weeds things like that we do have opportunities like that as well so with that I just want to thank you for your attention the opportunity to share today and we'll take any questions or just have some discussion thanks Danny there is a couple questions well I think you hit on it but are how are you how else are you continuing to work with the coastal miwak yeah that's a great question so um so our partner agencies like the park service and california state parks have staff cultural resource staff that are um you know dedicated to to building relationships and working with the coast miwak and the federated indians of gratin rancheria just as as part of their job right um so uh uh those conversations and collaborations are are ongoing they're always ongoing um there's a couple of different ways that that our work touches the tribe um one of them is when we do projects there's a compliance process involved with that um like a regulatory process and as part of that regulatory process agencies are required to consult with the tribe before doing projects right so you've probably heard some folks have probably heard of the california environmental environmental quality act sequa or the national environmental protection act nipa um those um laws and regulations require agencies to work with tribes when they're doing you know work that could impact cultural resources so that's one um very clear point of connection um on the programmatic side and specific to forest health actually i'm meeting with um representatives of the federated indians of gratin rancheria along with the author of the forest health chapter on indigenous stewardship and tribal partnership peter nelson we're meeting on monday to talk about next steps for collaborating on this work and my hope is is that out of that conversation and listening and sharing can come opportunities for the tribe to have representatives that talks like this so um i would love to co-present this talk with someone from the tribe i think that would be a really powerful and impactful program i mentioned hikes uh and other opportunities to kind of get outdoors and i'd love to kind of co-present or co-deliver programs with um representatives of the tribe when we talk about forest health and then the tribe can talk more about some of the traditional tribal knowledge that they have indigenous uses of plants right and they can speak for themselves and share that knowledge and it's not you know someone like me appropriating that information and giving it to you on the tribe's behalf which which we don't really want to do um and then i think those are the main ways right we just want to kind of continue the conversation around forest health obviously when there's projects and active management that's going to happen there's a process that the agencies have for integrating the tribe into that process it's more formal and has a legal framework but from my perspective i would just like to continue to involve the tribe in talking about this work by co-presenting being a part of walks and hikes and doing some some of their own interpretation of traditional tribal knowledge in these spaces on mount tam and elsewhere and we're in county love it thank you um another question could you speak to how your forest health strategy will inform prioritization of projects yeah that's a great question so um we talked about and i shared some of the different forest health stressors that we were able to to kind of uncover through this analysis um what we're doing is we're we're overlaying those areas that are impacted by forest health stressors right so whether it's um invasive plants or areas that have uh are showing high impacts from fire exclusion or their vegetation communities that we know are um need fire to be healthy and haven't had fire in a really long time or areas that have those pathogen impacts right so sudden oak death pitch pine canker areas where we can see that the forest and we've documented and mapped where the forest has really heavily impacts from these pathogens those are areas where the forest is sort of out of sync right where the resilience is low so those are part of our prioritization framework and then we layer on another thing that really gives us um called our our feasibility analysis which really just gives us at a high level at the landscape level um an idea of where places are accessible right because we're talking about forested landscapes so these are not some places are really not accessible by machines or even hand crews to do manual work right they're too steep they're too dangerous they're too far away from roads and trails we just physically can't get people and equipment out to that those spaces to do forestry work so we have a way of kind of looking at the landscape looking at what's feasible from an access perspective and then looking at where we have the areas that are highly impacted by some of those forest health stressors that we talked about today and those are the areas that rank highly in our prioritization framework there's also a lot of a lot of other things that go into prioritization certainly cultural values and conversations with the tribe like there are places that are special and important to the tribe where they want to see forest management happen so that's a prioritization criteria and there are other things too like um endangered species habitat so places where we have federally listed salmonids like um coho salmon or steelhead trout and where the forests really are providing you know critical habitat for those fish species um cooling shade which you know cools of pool water or what fish need right when they're in the river and so doing work to kind of make sure that we address the resilience of those forested areas so that we're protecting that critical habitat for fish you know that feeds into our prioritization model so it's actually quite complex and that's just a really high level overview of prioritization but we have a whole chapter on it and the forest health strategy so and that's published if um if you're the person that asked that question wants to read more um we have a whole chapter that you could explore on on that thinking wow thank you so I do have a couple questions too about monitoring and I try to do this in one thing but um can you talk a little more about what monitoring looks like for these projects yes yes yeah monitoring is a big subject and we again we have a whole chapter on it in the in the strategic plan um so I can just break it down for you at a high level right like monitoring is something that um uh similar to the the you know connections with the tribe um as part of project compliance right so that kind of environmental quality act that national environmental protection act um there's a legal framework for monitoring that's required you know kind of at a bare minimum um for these types of projects especially when you're working around sensitive plants um an animal species right so um there's a regulatory framework that requires certain amount of monitoring uh which means like botanists um you know wildlife biological monitors you know cultural monitors if it's a cultural resource that can be impacted um it means people on the ground you know checking for sensitive areas you know making sure that the work doesn't impact those sensitive areas or sensitive species or sensitive resources so that's like a bare minimum of monitoring and then really quickly like the other layers of monitoring that we're interested in are um you know things like the wildlife camera project marine wildlife watch you know looking at where we're placing treatments on the landscape and looking at changes in the occupancy of wildlife or bird species for example right so um we have baseline understanding from marine wildlife watch and other wildlife monitoring like nesting bird surveys prior to projects so that we have a pretty good idea of what the wildlife dynamics are prior to implementing a project so following on that monitoring so looking at to try and establish trends to evaluate the the benefits the impact of our work good or bad hopefully good um usually designed to be good but there are always unintended consequences so that's why monitoring is really important and then the third layer of monitoring that I'll just quickly mention is sort of this landscape level monitoring a lot of the work you can tell as part of our forest health strategy has been to map things like vegetation communities so when you think about um remapping the distribution of vegetation communities and then looking at the relationship of those changes to where we have done treatments on the landscape that can really inform at kind of a really big you know county wide scale across those 118,000 acres of forest and marine county you know where have we placed treatments um what have been the changes on the landscape and how do those we think those treatments may have contributed to either changes or not changes right um maybe we increase the resilience of a place we have a wildfire and we find that that place comes back as coast redwood for us like it was prior to the fire um and we find that we did some treatments in there um that's a another level of monitoring that kind of happens at the landscape scale so everything from on the ground all the way up wow that's all so deep but yet thank you for making it very accessible Danny do we have any more questions and there's some um thank yous from our youtube and that that monitoring question did come from youtube um looks like we have answered all of the questions your last chance friends to ask Danny a question was a lot of information and you can watch this and all of our other nature boosts on youtube i will be editing this a little bit um later on tomorrow so take away some of the my unmutedness earlier all right i think we look good i'm going to put um one last time let's put in the one tam website thank you Danny so much and our friends at the conservancy thank you we appreciate you being here today and library community as always we appreciate you being here thanks everybody thanks for your attention thank you Danny thank you friends so you see all the chat right Danny i do see it thank you everybody