How Cal Fire’s Davis nursery aims to replace trees burned in wildfires

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    DAVIS, California (KOVR) — Wildfires scorched more than a million acres in California last year, and the state Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) says the state faces a growing threat of large blazes.

Tiny seedlings will soon be used to replace trees burned during those devastating wildfires.

Cal Fire has a reforestation center in Davis, where they grow row after row of trees.

“It’s incredibly important. If we don’t reforest after a wildfire has gone through an area, we risk permanent forest loss,” said Topher Byrd of the reforestation center. “We also risk losing the ecosystem systems that the forest provides.”

The process starts out in established forests, where workers collect pine cones.

They’re then brought back to Davis to be harvested. Eventually, the baby trees grow for a year and are then boxed up and replanted in burn scars across the state.

“We’ve got approximately 1.8 million acres of forest land that needs reforestation from these devastating fires that we’ve experienced in the last 5 to 10 years,” Byrd said.

The Davis facility also houses California’s seed vault, a storage area kept at a frigid zero degrees Fahrenheit with 40,000 pounds of seeds that can be used to regrow native species lost during catastrophic events.

Cal Fire’s nursery currently produces a quarter-million trees each year, and now they’re getting ready to expand by growing four times bigger on the facility’s vacant land that was once used as an airstrip.

“Even increasing to a million is still only a fraction of the overall need,” Byrd said.

It’s California’s ongoing effort to recover from past fires and protect forests for future generations.

“These are not going to be large mature trees for 50-plus years,” Byrd said.

The Davis location is Cal Fire’s only nursery in the entire state. The expansion effort is currently in the design phase, and they’re hoping to be up and running in a couple of years.

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