Following decades of fire suppression, the Coconino National Forest has become overcrowded with dense thickets of small, unhealthy trees that are adding to fire and flood concerns.
Federal and county officials are embarking on a year-long thinning project they hope will prevent millions in flood damages and stop fires from growing out of control.
Jay Smith heads forest restoration efforts for the Coconino County Flood Control District. He says the forest is in “a tree pandemic. We have too many trees.”
“Even though it looks green and healthy, it’s very unhealthy,” Smith said. “The best way to get ourselves back to a healthy forest is to reduce the number of trees.”
The county is targeting 1,500 acres near Snowbowl for forest thinning. The first phase will cover 500 acres.
Smith says dense forests not only make it harder to control fires, the excess debris from overcrowding also adds to local flood risk.
“If we have the fire and the monsoon rains after a fire like we typically do here, we’re gonna have upwards of $2.8 billion in economic impacts to the region, specifically to Flagstaff, just from post-fire flooding,” Smith said.
The Nature Conservancy says healthy forests should have 100 trees or less per acre. Due to a combination of climate-driven impacts and fire suppression, most forests in the West today have upwards of 1,500 trees per acre.
This change is evident in the Coconino National Forest.
“We will likely never get back to truly what it naturally looked like,” Smith said. “We can see through old photographs what the forest structure looked like. Likely, we will never get back to that.”
Smith says the county has contributed $4.27 million to the effort and the U.S. Forest Service is providing $500,000, along with oversight of the project.
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