Pacific Southwest Region

Southern California Hazardous Fuels Rehabilitation and Restoration

Seedlings for Forest Renewal

• California Department of Forestry
• Forest Service TEAMS Enterprise
• Angeles, Cleveland, Los Padres, and San Bernardino National Forests

Millions of seedlings will be needed to restore forests in southern California devastated by wildfire, drought, and bark beetles. The best seeds for those seedlings are from local trees already adapted to the harsh conditions in southern California.

TEAMS Enterprise, a Forest Service enterprise venture, is leading the effort to collect conifer seed from forested lands across southern California. TEAMS is managing this effort, conducting surveys, collecting cones and shipping them to the Forest Service Nursery at Placerville where the seeds will be extracted from the cones and stored. Over the next three to five years, depending on cone crops, nearly 9000 pounds of conifer seed will be collected. Seedlings from that seed will be produced at California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CDF) or Forest Service nurseries and made available over the next decade to land owners and managers to reforest state, private, tribal and federal lands in southern California.

This multi-agency, cooperative cone collection effort across a huge and diverse geographic area is unprecedented. It is funded through the Forest Service's Cooperative Forestry Stewardship Program and national forest vegetation management funds.

TEAMS is also working with CDF to produce white-pine blister rust resistant sugar pine that can be used in reforesting lands in southern California. This disease, which kills susceptible trees, has not been found in southern California yet but is likely to spread there from other parts of the state. Sugar pine are located that appear to be disease free. These trees are tagged and a GPS location is recorded so the tree can be found in the future. Seedlings are grown from seed collected from the trees and inoculated with the fungus that causes the blister rust disease. If the seedlings prove resistant, foresters return to the tagged tree and collect more seed that will be used to produce seedlings that will be planted in burned over and beetle-damaged forests. Funding for this project is from Forest Service State and Private forest health funds.

In a separate effort between local tribal partners and the Cleveland National Forest, acorns are also being collected in San Diego County to produce oak seedlings needed for reforestation.

Success Stories

• Barton Flats
• Breaking Barriers
• Burn Area Restoration Projects
• Carveacre Community Protection
• Charlton Flats
• Crystal Lake
• Evacuation Route Clearing
• Forest Area Safety Taskforce
• Grant Successes
• June Aerial Flight Results
• Kuffel Canyon Road
• Laguna Mountain Community Protection
• Lake Arrowhead Log Storage Facility
• March Aerial Flight Results
• Mistletoe Eradication
• North Lake Arrowhead Fuels Reduction
• Seeds for Forest Renewal
• Skyline Fuels Reduction Project
• Student Conservation Association Partnership
• Take Pride in America

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