Diamond Mountain – Mark West CAL FIRE Planning Project
Diamond Mountain – Mark West area residents have experienced multiple devastating fires in recent years which have brought the community together to develop their Community Wildfire Protection Plan. To further assist their fire mitigation work, the community applied for and successfully received a CAL FIRE Grant to develop their Forest Stewardship Plan.
The Forest Stewardship Plan will be developed with the communities in the Diamond Mountain – Mark West area in partnership with the RCD, Forest Regenerative Solutions and Fire Safe Sonoma. This plan will build on previous work done in the local CWPPs by creating location specific community-scale treatment options. Each unit will develop a set of maps during the unit planning workshop that include ingress and egress routes and feasible management action based on topography, vegetation, water, access, etc. Each unit will develop a list of prioritized treatments based on risk, biological hazard, costs, and ease of CEQA clearance.
Grant Timeline October 2022 – May 2024
The project goals of this grant are as follows:
- Improve fire control, public safety, and protection of communities and infrastructure through the planning of three shaded fuel breaks
- Support landowners through a planning process that provides them with the needed information and tools to manage and sustain lower fire risk, and an ecologically healthy landscape.
- Create a community forest stewardship plan to lead to funding and implementation of cooperative forest stewardship actions that reduce high intensity wildfire and improve forest ecology and climate resilience, while sustaining and improving critically endangered Coho and Steelhead Salmon in the Mark West Creek watershed.
- Complete the planning and scope the environmental compliance needs to make the project area eligible for funding for stewardship activities through various state and federal grant programs.
For more info: DMMW CAL FIRE Planning Grant
Funding for this project is provided by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection’s Fire Prevention Program as part of the California Climate Investments Program.
