Jamestown Fire Mitigation

About the Project

The St. Vrain and Left Hand Water Conservancy District, in collaboration with the Left Hand Watershed Center, Lefthand Fire Protection District, and the Boulder Valley and Longmont Conservation Districts, is working to plan a fire mitigation project with the community of Jamestown. When a fire arrives, this project will provide a critical location for safe deployment of firefighters, reduce risk to the Jamestown community and surrounding areas, and decrease the likelihood of high-severity fire and its impacts to water resources and ecosystem health. This project will provide free fire mitigation to selected private and public properties. The Watershed Center is conducting outreach and coordination, and will conduct pre- and post-project monitoring from the forest to the creek. To learn more visit: https://watershed.center/project/jamestown-fire-mitigation/

Initial project goals include:

• Creating a fire break that firefighters can work from when a fire occurs, thus decreasing risk to the life and property in the community of Jamestown and communities east of Jamestown (fires typically move west to east in this area).
• Decreasing the risk of high-severity fire to water supplies, by decreasing the likelihood of high-severity fire above James Creek.
• Improving the resilience of our forest to drought and fire, for the benefit of the ecosystem (plants and wildlife alike).

Proposed Project Area

What Goes into Developing a Forest Management Plan?

To develop a plan for what we want to see as an outcome of treatments (on-the-ground actions), we incorporate/integrate the following information:

• Landowner goals and preferences.
• Historical conditions (e.g. tree density, canopy cover, size of meadows, plant species present).
• Current ecological conditions (e.g. tree density, canopy cover, size of meadows)
• Topography (aspect, slope, position on slope).
• Fire behavior modeling with current conditions and with post-treatment conditions.

Project Partners

Project Manager

Maria Pezza, Community Program Manager
Email: mpezza[at] watershed [dot] center