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National Fire Plan Success Story

Yosemite Fire Partners for Stewardship Project
Yosemite National Park, California
National Fire Plan - Fuels Reduction

Yosemite Fire, Yosemite Resources Management and Science, and the Yosemite Institute (YI) worked together on a stewardship project in the Ahwahnee Meadow to help slow conifer encroachment.

Yosemite Institute is nonprofit partner in Yosemite National Park dedicated to providing educational adventures in nature's classroom to inspire a personal connection to the natural world and responsible actions to sustain it. Students from schools throughout California and the United States come for week-long, hands on, educational opportunities.

Yosemite Fire worked with the YI staff and students as well as staff from the park's Resources Management and Science Division to removing young incense cedar and ponderosa pines trees from the Ahwahnee Meadow. Trees are encroaching and shrinking meadows throughout the park. Four different school groups of approximately fifteen students worked for about an hour each throughout the day.

Before the students began this stewardship project, staff from Yosemite Fire and Resources Management and Science talked to the students about why this work was being done. In the Sierra Nevada, many meadows are shrinking because of the loss of naturally cycling fire that routinely cleared the meadows of encroaching trees. Additionally, changes in hydrological patterns caused by roads, trails, and other development have created drier meadows that conifers tree can more easily live in.

YI instructors and park staff challenged students to consider the impacts of seemingly innocuous actions and asked them to try to find solutions for the issue at hand. After a safety briefing and teaching the students to tred lightly in the meadow, the fun began.

Students went into the Ahwahnee Meadow with loppers and handsaws and removed ponderosa pine and incense cedar trees smaller than three inches in diameter. The trees were than hauled to the park's burn pile.

This stewardship project showed students how everyone working together can make a significant difference. It seemed a daunting task when first looking out on the meadow. However, with everyone contributing and doing their part, there was a much clearer, more open meadow at the end of the day. Six truckloads of trees were removed in the course of the day, and the students know that they made the difference.

This project is a step towards restoring the Ahwahnee Meadow to more natural conditions. Yosemite Fire plans a prescribed fire in the meadow this year to prevent further encroachment of the meadow and Resources Management and Science is exploring efforts to restore natural hydrological patterns in Ahwahnee Meadow. Other meadow restoration projects in the park have been highly successful.

For more information about Yosemite Institute, please visit www.yni.org.

Contact: Deb Schweizer, Fire Education Specialist
Phone: (209) 372-0480