Tahoe-Central Sierra Initiative (TCSI)
The risks of large, high-severity fires, prolonged and severe drought periods, and widespread beetle-caused tree mortality threaten the resilience of forest landscapes and pose a high risk of catastrophic fire to communities.
TCSI was created as a partnership between state, federal, nonprofit, and private partners in response to state and federal mandates that call for increasing the pace and scale of forest management and restoration and better protection of communities from wildfire due to these increased risks.
TCSI aims to accelerate large-landscape forest restoration to improve the health and resilience of the central Sierra Nevada in northern California and Nevada and adjacent areas around Lake Tahoe. It focuses on developing and demonstrating innovative planning, investment, and management tools across a 2.4-million-acre landscape.
It is hoped that lessons learned and tools created by this effort can be applied across the entire Sierra Nevada and beyond to accelerate the restoration of this spectacular and vital region.
 Framework for ResilienceThe "Framework for Resilience" defines resilience and describes the elements and metrics that can be measured to assess resilience and to monitor change over time. We defined socioecological resilience based on ten pillars during a TCSI partnership workshop in 2018. The resulting document is a broad overview that identifies these pillars and their individual elements (primary processes and functions) and the metrics used to characterize these elements. |
 Assessment of Current Landscape ConditionsThe purpose of this initial assessment was to understand key aspects of current forest and landscape conditions, including fire and beetle/drought risk and biomass-processing capacity, across the TCSI area to establish the need and urgency for restoration based on a scientific foundation. We defined resilience in the earlier "Framework for Resilience" based on ten pillars. Building on that, this assessment evaluated key features of the landscape in terms of resilience by assessing current conditions (2018–2020) across six of the ten pillars of resilience: forest resilience, fire dynamics, fire-adapted communities, biodiversity conservation, carbon sequestration, and economic diversity. |
 Blueprint for Resilience: The Tahoe-Central Sierra InitiativeThe Blueprint is the culmination of this effort to improve resilience to anticipated climate change and wildfire, beetle, and drought-caused tree mortality. It brings together the evaluations of 30 unique metrics, such as large tree density and probability of high severity fire, that describe conditions across five of the pillars of resilience: forest resilience, fire-adapted communities, fire dynamics, biodiversity conservation, and carbon sequestration. First completed as a report, the TCSI Blueprint is now published as a General Technical Report. |
Staff
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Person
Patricia N. Manley, PhD
Research Ecololgisthttps://research.fs.usda.gov/about/people/patricia.manley -
Person
Nicholas Povak
Research Ecologisthttps://research.fs.usda.gov/about/people/nicholas.povak -
Person
Katherine Zeller, PhD
Research Biologisthttps://research.fs.usda.gov/about/people/katherine.zeller
Collaborators
Kira Hefty, Postdoctoral Research Biologist, USDA Forest Service, Pacific Southwest Research Station and Rocky Mountain Research Station, Missoula, MT
Kristen N. Wilson, Senior Scientist, The Nature Conservancy, San Francisco, CA
Mary Lou Fairweather, Writer/Editor, USDA Forest Service, Pacific Southwest Research Station-affiliate, Sacramento, CA
Vivian Griffey, Research Analyst, ORISE Research Fellow, USDA Forest Service, Pacific Southwest Research Station, Wenatchee, WA
Liraz Bistritz, Research Analyst, ORISE Research Fellow, USDA Forest Service, Pacific Southwest Research Station, Placerville, CA