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From 02/09/18 New Mexico In Focus broadcast: This month on “Our Land: New Mexico’s Environmental Past, Present and Future,” we head to Sandia Peak—and learn what’s missing up there right now. With Kerry Jones, a warning coordination meteorologist with the National Weather Service, we learn why this year’s record-low snowpack has such big implications for New Mexicans across the state. A “water year” runs from October 1 through the end of September, and New Mexicans right now are standing at the driest start to any water year on record—that is, all the way back to the 1890s.

Video of site visits with researchers who have been studying how forests and wildlife respond to high severity burns. July 2016. Southwest fire Science Consortium

Video from Intermountain West Joint Venture

Video presentations from the conference held October 18-19, 2016 at Utah State University. As climate changes, forests are being impacted by severe drought, longer fire seasons, and impressive insect epidemics. New approaches to landscape restoration are needed to cope with these disturbances. The 2016 Restoring the West Conference offered presentations by experts in climate science, landscape restoration, and forest ecology on techniques for this uncertain future, and gave examples where these techniques are working.

KOAT TV features benefits of forest treatments supported through the Rio Grande Water Fund

An unprecedented 40-year experiment in a 40,000 acre valley of Yosemite National Park strongly supports the idea that managing fire, rather than suppressing it, makes wilderness areas more resilient to fire, with the added benefit of increased water availability and resistance to drought. After a three-year assessment of the Park's Illilouette Creek Basin, UC Berkeley researchers concluded that a strategy dating to 1973 of managing wildfires with minimal suppression and almost no prescribed burns has created a landscape more resistant to catastrophic fire, with more diverse vegetation, forest structure and increased water storage. "When fire is not suppressed, you get all these benefits: increased stream flow, increased downstream water availability, increased soil moisture, which improves habitat for the plants in the watershed. And it increases the drought resistance of the remaining trees and also increases the fire resilience because you have created these natural firebreaks," said Gabrielle Boisramé, graduate student at UC Berkeley's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and first author of the study. The Cohesive Wildland Fire Strategy supports management of fires where possible. Managing fires is part of the Cohesive Strategy vision: to safely and effectively suppress fires, use fire where allowable, manage our natural resources, and as a Nation, live with wildland fire. Read the full article and find the published study at: ttp://wildfireinthewest.blogspot.com/2016/10/wildfire-management-vs-suppression.html.

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Video by Friends of Verde River Greenway (FVRG)

Video by Dolores River Restoration Parnership

Video - 2015 Tamarisk Conference