March 2025

Mountain Cedar and Rewilding Podcast

Decision-Making Tool Update

Our process team workshop in Johnson City was a success. We have begun to hammer out the details. Key takeaways:

• Explain why we need a regional management strategy for Texas karst country + explain what it is and where it is.
• Focus on keeping the process as simple as possible without dumbing it down.
• Present a simple way to divide one’s property into smaller land management units (LMU). Rely on indicators to analyze land health. Then recommend management methods and ways to measure success.
• Group the indicators and management techniques into two categories: Levels 1 and 2. Level 1 will include basic, more familiar actions, while Level 2 will be more advanced.
• Support standard landowner goals, such as ranching, hunting, and recreation, but recommend which LMUs best support each goal to increase cost effectiveness and longer-lasting results.
• Select a variety of Texas karst country landowners to test the process. Use feedback to help fund further refinement and app development.

The first step of our decision-making tool will be to create a map that divides a landowner’s land into smaller land management units. Landowners will be guided on how to produce their maps using the Texas A&M Forest Service “Map Your Property” and manually adding other parameters. We are working with the Master Naturalists to provide assistance as needed.
Our goal is to developed an map-making app to simplify the process. To learn about the potential, Elizabeth met with Sean Moran, GIS Professor at Austin Community College, and one of his students. The discussion was positive and informative. We will use the feedback gathered from landowner trials to pursue funding to develop this much needed app.

Hardening Communities is More Important

Following the Los Angeles fires, on-the-ground news reporters were astonished to find homes that had escaped the flames. Those homes survived because they had been designed and managed to reduce fire risk. This is called “hardening.”

Hardening a single home doesn’t always work if that home is surrounded by a community of non-hardened homes. Individual home safety can exponentially increase when entire communities along the Urban Wildland Interface (UWI) are hardened. We should be spending our money on hardening– not on thinning forests and cutting down woody vegetation that will grow back as more flammable grass. Listen to what wildland fire mitigation expert, Justice Jones says.

Last month’s Texas Monthly article wrote a whole lot about reducing wildland vegetation, but nothing about hardening communities. It is ironic since the primary study they cited by CoreLogic emphasized the importance of hardening communities. The only vegetation management mentioned in the study was within the 30′ buffer zone of structures. And although it’s a good idea to add fire breaks and shaded fuel brakes within wildland vegetation, it would be prudent and cost effective to first upgrade all existing UWI communities and mandate that all future UWI communities be designed and built to reduce fire risk.