Sierra Nevada project leads to co-stewardship in a pinyon-juniper ecosystem

This June, under the blazing Nevada sun, USDA Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station research ecologist, Alexandra (Ali) Urza, led a group of partners through a pinyon-juniper woodland to gather input for improving ecosystem resilience. She and ecologist Cole Lysgaard, both of the Rocky Mountain Research Stations Maintaining Resilient Dryland Ecosystems science program, conducted a workshop for the project partners to demonstrate what different management techniques on the pinyon-juniper landscape would look like on the ground.

Photo Credit

USDA Forest Service by Lyndsay Saunders

RMRS ecologist Cole Lysgaard leads a discussion of different treatment options with the workshop group as they survey the characteristics of a pinyon-juniper stand.

The Masonic Mountain Pinyon-Juniper Project, funded by the Sierra Nevada Conservancy, is using a consent-based approach to develop a management plan for the pinyon-juniper woodlands in the study area, bringing in the perspectives of two Tribal partners, the Bridgeport Indian Colony and the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California, as well as collaborators from the Humbolt-Toiyabe National Forest, University of Nevada Reno, Stanford University, University of California Berkeley, and the Great Basin Bird Observatory.

The collaborative nature of this project is of particular note. Management of pinyon-juniper woodlands by land management agencies has been contentious. Common management techniques, such as tree removal to achieve objectives such as fuels reduction, have sometimes conflicted with the ties Tribal Nations hold with their ancestral lands. Pinyon pine trees produce pine nuts which are of great significance to many local Tribes and form part of their cultural identity. Additionally, pine nuts are a primary food source for pinyon jays, a regional corvid species whose populations have been in decline and have recently been petitioned for listing under the Endangered Species Act. Effective stewardship of pinyon pines is of primary importance to the birds and those who appreciate them. Project lead Ali Urza has envisioned a process in which partners can weigh in on proposed management actions before implementation to build stronger community support and integrate a more diverse set of perspectives.

As a first step in the project, Urza is using demonstration units to create an opportunity for partners to experience the proposed treatment actions and share feedback before recommending treatments on the broader landscape. The demonstration area is located on 17.4 acres (7 hectares) just north of Bridgeport, California, situated in the Sierra Front of eastern California. The project area was chosen for treatment based on several considerations, including its remote location, which has a low probability of impacting other woodland uses like pine nut collecting for Indigenous communities, as well as protecting some of the trees in a stand showing emerging health concerns, such as ips beetle impacts.

Photo Credit

USDA Forest Service by Erika Reiter

Forest Service partner Paul Burow (Stanford University) flags trees within the experimental treatment site.

In preparation for the recent workshop, Urza and others with forestry management backgrounds divided the demonstration area into four separate units and used flagging to denote which trees would be removed under different management actions. The proposed management actions include several approaches aimed at improving pinyon-juniper woodland resilience. The first treatment will reinforce existing canopy gaps by removing recently established trees, aiming to maintain open areas of understory vegetation within the woodland. The second and third treatments will use uneven-aged thinning, which is designed to reduce competition and fuel continuity while ensuring a mix of sizes and variation in spacing in the trees that remain. One uneven-aged thinning treatment will be considered “light”, with the spacing between crowns less than the other uneven-aged “moderate” treatment, which will have greater spacing between the crowns. The fourth treatment will combine the gap treatment with the light uneven-aged thinning treatment. Additionally, a control site adjacent to the treatment plots will remain untreated.

After a day of flagging trees, Urza and crew returned the following day for the workshop to meet with a few of the partners and go over the initial decision-making process for the selected treatments. Participants spent the morning walking through the demonstration units in small groups to discuss the treatment approaches, their significance for different management goals, and the desired outcomes. Then the partners provided feedback on the treatments, with note-takers documenting all the comments received. After a picnic lunch, partners completed a survey to gather additional data on their perceptions of the proposed treatments. The day concluded with a visit to a nearby old growth pinyon-juniper stand.

Photo Credit

USDA Forest Service by Erika Reiter

RMRS research ecologist Ali Urza leads a discussion with partners at the Pinyon-Juniper Demonstration Project site. 

The project’s next steps are to incorporate the feedback from the workshop participants into the proposed treatment actions for the demonstration units as part of a consent-based decision-making process. In fall 2024, Urza will work with a forestry crew to carry out the treatments on the demonstration units. In 2025, public field days will be held to get feedback from community members, discuss treatments in a landscape context, and to identify priorities for Indigenous stewardship areas. The data gathered from this demonstration project, as well as subsequent community engagement, will help inform management actions on nearby Masonic Mountain at a much larger scale. The collaborative co-stewardship of these pinyon-juniper woodlands allows for integrated management goals and the building of trust and community support for essential management tasks required to improve the resilience of pinyon-juniper woodlands.

To view images from the workshop, please visit the project Flickr album.

Working together with states, tribes, communities, and landowners allows us to make positive changes to forests across boundaries and at a larger scale. Through working together to develop joint priorities for shared landscapes, the scale of our work will match the scale of the challenge.