Notes from the Cal Fire Forester Lecture Series
A few takeaways from this year's Cal Fire Forester Lecture Series, where the state’s best foresters shared hard-won lessons on forest health, prescribed fire, and working across silos.
Kyle D. Peczkowski
Board Certified Master Arborist & Urban Forester
The Cal Fire Forester Lecture Series is one of the best professional gatherings most people have never heard of. It is not a conference with a trade show floor. It is a room full of foresters, fire planners, and land managers talking about what actually worked and what absolutely did not.
This year's theme was resilience at the landscape scale. Speaker after speaker returned to the same point: we have spent decades optimizing forests for timber, viewsheds, or wildfire suppression, and now we are paying the price in stands that are uniformly vulnerable to drought, beetles, and catastrophic fire.
The most useful session for my own work was on prescribed fire liability. A Cal Fire unit forester walked through a real burn that escaped its unit, what went wrong, how the investigation unfolded, and what changed in their planning process afterward. There is no substitute for that kind of honest post-mortem.
Another theme was workforce. California does not have enough qualified burn bosses, enough prescribed fire practitioners, or enough young foresters entering the profession. Programs like this lecture series are part of the recruitment pipeline.
I left with a longer reading list and a few new contacts for our county coordination group. Professional development does not always have to be a credential. Sometimes it is just sitting in a room with people who take the work seriously.