OUTCOME: Capacity

Problem

Tribes, economically disadvantaged communities, private landowners, and local community and watershed groups face many challenges in efforts to steward the land, reduce fire risk, and increase community and ecosystem health and resilience. They need targeted assistance to navigate permitting requirements, find and apply for funding, engage restoration professionals and contractors to plan and implement projects, and monitor and maintain lands for long-term resilience.

Solution

Technical Assistance - Provide support and technical assistance to Tribes, economically disadvantaged communities, private landowners, and local community and watershed groups for planning and implementing high-priority community and ecosystem resilience projects.

Background and Context

Tribes, economically disadvantaged communities, and local community and watershed groups who are engaged in enhancing community and landscape resilience face significant barriers to planning and implementing projects. These barriers include capacity limitations at many levels, including lack of sufficient staff, lack of technical expertise, federal and state permitting requirements, and funding sources that are complex, volatile, and variable from year to year.

Small, private, non-industrial landowners are critical partners in ecosystem management and restoration in the North Coast region. Statewide, there are 87,000 landowners who own 10 or more acres. More than half are over 65 and retired, and 40% live on the land (UCCE). Many are affected by legacy issues created by previous owners who logged and/or subdivided the land they now own. Forest stewardship and restoration efforts in California will not succeed without their participation, and therefore helping them to overcome the barriers to planning and implementing projects is critical. Barriers to land stewardship by private landowners include the need for expensive management actions that don’t generate revenue to pay for themselves, limited markets for low-value wood products, programs that do not assist all private ownership types (i.e. <20 acre parcels), and a serious shortage of restoration professionals at all levels, including Registered Professional Foresters (RPFs) and NRCS Technical Service Providers (TSPs), restoration ecologists, agency staff, and contractors who can implement the work.

Recommendations

To support the capacity of Tribes, Tribal communities, and economically disadvantaged communities, NCRP will continue to expand its long-term program to identify technical assistance needs in the region, contract with technical assistance providers, and connect them with entities that need technical assistance. NCRP has a long history of providing technical assistance to disadvantaged and Tribal communities using a “circuit rider” approach to facilitate peer to peer technical service. Technical assistance can support project feasibility studies, grant writing, engineering support, GIS mapping, design and planning, economic analysis, and budgetary advice to entities in eligible North Coast communities.

Local entities, such as Tribes, RCDs and CBOs like watershed councils have existing relationships in their communities and are ideally situated to provide technical assistance with assessment, planning, and implementation of restoration and reforestation projects when they have staff or consultants with the right skill set. If staffed and funded adequately, Tribes, CBOs and RCDs can coordinate between landowners, technical specialists, and local and regional implementation groups (i.e., California Conservation Corps) as well as assist with project permitting.

Actions

Maintain and expand NCRP’s technical assistance program to support Tribes, underserved communities, landowners, and CBOs engaged in community and landscape resilience work with a diversity of capacity support and technical expertise needed for successful project development, funding, and implementation.

Provide technical assistance to address the needs identified in the NCRP Disadvantaged Community & Tribal Water & Wastewater Service Providers Needs Assessment Summary.

  • Support and expand partner agency training programs for private landowners, such as UCCE’s Forest Stewardship series.
  • Support development of a forest management handbook for small parcel forest landowners in the North Coast region, if necessary, or evaluate whether existing handbooks are sufficient (i.e., the newly developed USFS Forest management handbook for small-parcel landowners in the Sierra Nevada and southern Cascade Range).
  • Provide outreach to nonindustrial private forest landowners (NIPFs) concerning the process and timeframe for reforestation under the programs and guidance of UCCE, RPFs, RCDs, and CAL FIRE.

  • Where commonly used spatial data is required for planning, permitting, and implementation (i.e., parcel-level vegetation type, hydrology, or digital elevation models), develop automated map PDF sets similar to those developed from the Sonoma and Marin Counties fine scale vegetation maps and other data sources.
  • Train CBOs in how to access and use regional programmatic permits for landscape-scale restoration rather than individual site-by-site permits. (See Capacity – Streamlined Permitting Solution).
  • Provide technical assistance to ensure that projects are monitored and maintained, so biodiversity and ecosystem health and resilience goals are achieved, using ecologically beneficial maintenance techniques, including prescribed fire. Include landowner, citizen science, or regional ecologist training for measuring a standard set of project monitoring indicators. Develop the infrastructure to coordinate and provide follow up or intermediate treatments as indicated by monitoring.
  • Develop cost-effective monitoring guidelines, methodologies, and supporting templates tied to RFFC Outcomes and Performance Metrics and donor/funder requirements, focused on the socioeconomic and ecosystem outcomes desired in the region. Include photo-monitoring and quantitative/qualitative landowner data in simple pre- and post-project surveys that landowners and citizen scientists can fill out and submit digitally.

  • Identify watershed councils, landowner groups, and private landowners who are interested in working together and develop capacity in local groups to administer contracts to develop and implement FHMPs.

  • Where appropriate, leverage CFIP, EQIP, and other funding sources to maximize the amount and quality of restoration projects. Calculate cost-benefit inflection point for maximal landowner participation related to factors such as cost, contribution, ease of program participation.

Create a landowner peer-learning network to further maximize landowner planning and implementation assistance for restoration projects and accelerate the adoption and scale of ecological forestry practices. The network may certify landowners as technical assistance providers or forest resilience program trainers. Explore additional pathways to rapidly accelerate landowner capacity building for planning and implementation.

Advocate for expansion of the DOC Forest Health Watershed Coordinators program to support several coordinators to provide training and technical assistance for project design and implementation throughout the region. Explore the feasibility of expanding this program to administrative capacity for a centralized grant application, management, and reporting system at the watershed or regional scale.

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