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.


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.


Pat Manley (USFS), Nick Povak (USFS)

This project is evaluating the potential outcomes of management that reflect historical disturbance return intervals or historical stand structure. 


Matt Sloggy (USFS), Haojie Chen (USFS)

This project is developing a framework and theory to assess investments in ecosystem service provisioning. The authors use the theory to interpret benefit flows from a series of LANDIS model runs for carbon, wood products, and water related benefits. They use the framework to discuss the potential attractiveness of conservation investments within the Tahoe region. 


Eli Boardman (Univ. Nevada - Reno), Adrian Harpold (UNR), Zhuoran Duan (Pacific Northwest National Lab), Mark Wigmosta (PNNL)

Using the DHSVM hydrology model and novel linkages between the hydrology model and the LANDIS-II forest landscape model, this    group is assessing how management actions, forest dynamics, and climate will impact water supplies in the future.


Sam Evans (CalFire)

This project assesses the costs and potential revenues of fuel-reduction treatments in the study area, as a potential mechanism to fund fuel reduction and forest restoration treatments.


Jonathan Long (USFS), Mark Adams (USFS)

This project evaluates projected future landscape treatments and outcomes simulated using the LANDIS-II modeling framework thorugh an environmental justice lens. We consider how such strategies might be adjusted to achieve greater benefits to underserved communities. 


Ethan Yackulic (Northern Arizona Univ.), Katharyn Duffy (NAU)

This project is projecting the consequences of fire and fuel-reduction treatments on carbon stocks, using both empirical data from recent fires and using simulations through the Forest Vegetation Simulator. 


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.