Recently, CAL FIRE, the USDA Forest Service, and the Climate and Wildfire Institute joined a field tour at the Teakettle Experimental Forest. Located within the Sierra National Forest, Teakettle has over 25 years of history in forest ecology research. Attendees joined UC Davis Principal Investigator, Malcolm North, for a tour of a proposed prescribed fire project. Funded by a CAL FIRE Forest Health Grant, this project spans 3,300 acres, demonstrating a pivotal effort in landscape-scale prescribe

Big trees are important to forest ecology for lots of reasons: as living trees, as “snags” or dead-standing trees, as dead wood on the forest floor, they are vital to forests’ function, their ecology, their biodiversity. But one thing that we don’t think about as much is the role that big trees play in creating canopy gaps. Canopy gaps are themselves important habitat features (foraging habitat for bats and birds, among other habitats) but are also important to creating the multi-generationality