SANTA CLARITA, Calif. — TreePeople will plant 30,000 native plants in the mountains of Los Angeles County over the next few years, with the help of community volunteers who recently showed up to start the restoration project.
“We don’t want to rely on the height of the container. You want to base the height on the level inside the container,” said Alyssa Walker, Mountain Forestry Program Manager for TreePeople.
In 2002, the Copper Fire tore through this area of the San Francisquito Canyon in Santa Clarita, burning 20,000 acres of native vegetation, leaving the area vulnerable, which then exacerbated invasive species encroachment.
When they take over, they siphon resources from native plants, forcing them out of the area and affecting food sources for animals. This is where TreePeople comes in to help.
“We find areas that have been impacted by fire, and we want to restore the balance to what this ecosystem looked like before the fire,” Walker said.
TreePeople has cleared this area of overgrown plants, but this is what it looked like before, completely overgrown with overgrown mustard and weeds.
This is a common occurrence in areas affected by forest fires.
US Forest Service ranger for the Angeles National Forest, Steven Bear, said that while native plants and trees burn slowly in a wildfire, the danger with invasive species is that when they dry out, they can ignite easily and carry fire quickly.
“They’re more capable of reproducing and seeding faster than native species, so they tend to make the landscape much more fire-prone,” Bear said.
And with California’s fire season growing year-round due to drought and climate change, the restoration work being done by TreePeople is even more vital.
“A healthy ecosystem will be able to fight fire much better than a degraded ecosystem,” Walker said.
Right across is one of their restored sites, a healthy ecosystem that is now 4 years old.
So, with the care and dedication of TreePeople, these young plants will grow successfully, bringing this ecosystem back to life and helping to slow the spread when the next wildfire burns.
