Los Gatos Creek Watershed Collaborative
Forest Health Grant Project

The Los Gatos Creek Watershed Collaborative Forest Health Project (Phase 2) addresses forest and wildfire resiliency by implementing a comprehensive and multi-jurisdictional approach to forest management. The approach emphasizes ecological principles and leverages ongoing CAL FIRE grant-funded work through the Phase 1 Los Gatos Creek Watershed Collaborative Project.

Treatments will occur in tree and shrub fuel types. Treatments are designed to improve stand structure and composition, reduce crown fire potential and fire intensity, reduce the spread of forest pathogens, and mitigate impacts of climate change to forestland ecological communities. Wildfire mitigation, risk reduction, and resiliency are achieved concurrently through integration of strategic management units focused on modifying fire behavior.

Treatment prescriptions also address forest type-conversion where there has been a lack of disturbance. In addition, treatments are proposed to support gradual change, steering a forest type toward more historical conditions and increasing resilience in the face of future disturbance.

The Los Gatos Creek Watershed Collaborative landscape-level effort has identified an interconnected mosaic of treatment areas that, with ecologically sensitive treatments, meet the goals of the Forest Health Program, which aims to do the following:

• Establish healthy, resilient fire-adapted ecosystems to protect and conserve natural resources.
• Protect upper watersheds where important regional water supplies originate.
• Promote the long-term storage of carbon and reduce the severity of catastrophic wildfire, thereby increasing community and forest ecosystem protection.

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