Active: Tahoe Central Sierra Initiative

We are engaged with landscape forecasting for the Tahoe-Central Sierra Initiative (TCSI) Environmental Markets project (see the map below). The region is home to hundreds of thousands of people, provides water for the Central Valley and Bay Area, supports tourism, and provides many other ecosystem services. Currently, these forests are threatened by climate change, wildfire, droughts, and outbreaks of insect pests.

Forest management is needed to confront these threats, but it is limited by the availability of consistent funding. Environmental markets (aka 'conservation financing' see the example below) could provide a mechanism for funding landscape management, particularly when both the challenges (climate change) and solutions (forest management) are broadly distributed spatially and temporally.

Along with numerous collaborators, we are forecasting climate futures, disturbance, and management strategies on forest condition, water supply, and wood products.

For more information, visit: https://sierranevada.ca.gov/what-we-do/tcsi/

Projects associated with TCSI

There are several collaborative and interdisciplinary components to the broader TCSI Environmental Markets project, ranging from forecasting climate impacts on forests, to modeling water supply consequences of fuel reduction treatments, to exploring environmental justice consequences of potential management portfolios. Only the leaders of each project are listed below; each project has numerous collaborators.

Forest dynamics and impacts of disturbances

Robert Scheller (NCSU), Sam Flake (NCSU)

We are forecasting impacts of climate change and shifting fire and insect outbreak regimes on forests. Using the LANDIS-II model with extensions to simulate fire and bark beetles, we are generating projections of forest characteristics, such as biomass, species composition, and carbon fluxes. We are analyzing the effects of climate and management on these elements, as well as creating data products used by collaborators, below.

Above: An example of a market-driven conservation finance plan as outlined by BlueForest: https://www.blueforest.org/

Below: The map of our study area.

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