Fire Safety and Forest Health Improved Across 1,000 Acres
Published 3/6/2025
It all began with the idea that wildland fire does not recognize property boundaries. Midpen joined forces with San Jose Water Company, Santa Clara County FireSafe Council and Santa Clara County Parks to form the Los Gatos Creek Watershed Collaboration in 2020, aimed at taking a holistic approach to vegetation management for forest health and fire resilience and safety.
Cal Fire liked this landscape-level thinking too and funded the Collaboration in 2021 with a $7.5 million forest health grant. This allowed 938 acres to be treated in strategic, interconnected locations throughout lands managed by the Collaboration partners in the greater Santa Cruz Mountains around Lexington Reservoir and beyond.
To date, nearly 1,000 acres of land have been treated as part of this collaboration resulting in healthier and more fire-resilient forests. Approximately one-third of the acres treated were located in Midpen’s Bear Creek Redwoods, Long Ridge, Saratoga Gap and Sierra Azul open space preserves.
“Partnerships and grant funding are critical in catalyzing local efforts to significantly reduce wildland fire risk within our region,” Midpen General Manager Ana María Ruiz said. “Collaborations like these are leveraging Midpen’s resources to proactively increase ecologically sensitive vegetation management
within the public open space preserves we manage.”
This spring, after a lot of hard work, the Collaborative is celebrating a major milestone with the completion of the first round of grant-funded work.
The goals of this work are threefold: restoring healthy forest ecosystems, reducing the severity of potential wildfires while enhancing the safety of the surrounding communities and protecting watersheds that provide regional drinking water. To date, all of this work has been achieved through ecologically sensitive mechanical and handwork.
Scaling Up
The Collaboration has been so successful and effective that it recently received a second forest health grant for $6.9 million from Cal Fire to nearly double its efforts and treat an additional 840 acres. A few larger-scale private property owners that have lands strategically located within the watershed have also been included in the second phase of the Collaboration’s work. Projects funded by the second grant have already begun in earnest, including shaded fuel break work in Midpen’s Sierra Azul Open Space Preserve that is also improving habitat for rare, endemic Santa Cruz kangaroo rats.
This second phase of work is expected to finished in the fall of 2027. By that time, the Collaboration intends to have treated nearly 1,800 acres.