Excerpt from the Executive Summary

Following the extensive Mendocino Complex Fire in 2018 and subsequent fires in the Mendocino National Forest (MNF) there is now a herculean management challenge and a great need for strategic landscape scale analysis and planning to restore desired conditions to the National Forest. These desired conditions include reforestation to create diverse ecological mosaics of habitat patches that are resilient and responsive to future fire regimes and altered climate dynamics. Of particular concern are the effects of climate change on the potential for revegetating forest lands with high exposure and high vulnerability (Stein et al. 2014) with the goal of maintaining the ecologically dynamic processes that will shape future landscapes. The authors of GTR-270 (Meyer et al. 2021) emphasize the need for prioritizing restoration management activities and this is a major objective of this research study.