Workforce Development
November 2024 - Tailored Workforce Investments: Highlights from the 2024 Training with Civicorps
October 2024 - Highlights from the Urban Conservation Corps of Inland Empire 2024 Training
July 2024 - How RFFC Leveraged FLN’s support and partnership to scale WRTC’s Fire Management Program from a Trinity County Program to a Statewide Effort
July 2024 - Recent RFFC Training Boosts Confidence Among Early Career Practitioners
May 2024 - Building Pathways to Wildfire Resilience Jobs through Partnerships-Recent Training With Conservation Corps North Bay Reaches 22 Students, Yields 1,800+ Training Hours, and Provides 138 Certificates
December 2023 - Better Fire Futures Project
December 2023 - Multi-Year Capacity Investments Produce Capacity “Dividends” in Butte County
December 2023 - Bringing Intentional Fire Back to Communities, For Good
December 2023 - Return on Prescribed Fire Investments Made in Butte County
October 2023 - The Watershed Research and Training Center Partners with Local Conservation Corps to Build California’s Wildfire Resilience Workforce
July 2022 - The Watershed Research and Training Center Awards $1,000,000 to Support Local Prescribed Burning Capacity
June 2022 - Workforce Development in Fire Resilience: Creating Pathways for Priority Populations
October 2021 - The Intertribal Indigenous Stewardship Project Launches Pilot Funding Opportunity to Support Cultural Burning
January 2020 - Investment Opportunities for Increasing Forest and Fire Management Capacity in California: A Capacity and Needs Assessment of Local Groups, Nonprofits and Tribes
Full Report / Shortened Executive Summary / Appendix
July 2020 - Review and Synthesis of Regional Priority Planning Processes in California
Full Report I Executive Summary
Fire Resilience Work
June 2025, Fire Learning Networks // Mapping a Movement: Community-Based Beneficial Fire Data Project - 2024
In 2024, 25 partners and organizations across the state of California collaborated to share information about community-forward cultural and prescribed burns across California as part of the Community-Based Beneficial Fire Data Project. This project demonstrates the growing momentum of locally led efforts to restore fire to California’s landscapes. In total, 4,921 participants participated in 379 training days, while 7,927 participants supported the implementation of 622 burn days across 4,215 acres. These actions reflect a broad set of objectives—including ecological restoration, fuel reduction, workforce development, and cultural burning.
Read the Full Report Visit the Interactive Dashboard
February 2025, The Watershed Center’s Fire Program 2024 Accomplishments
February 2025, Fire Adapted Communities Network Blog // Reflections from the Fire and Music Project
In the fall of 2023, we sent a group of artists as “The Fire and Music Project” on a one-year journey to shift our relationship with fire. Over the next six months during five intensive “artist learning immersions,” we traveled throughout Northern California listening to fire’s story, from the legacy of Indigenous stewardship, their loss of fire, and the rise of fire suppression, to fire ecology, modern cultural burning, the grassroots community-led burning movement, and the social fabric of the present moment.
December 2024, The Fire and Music Project // “Fire Says”
What is your relationship to fire? Who was the last person in your lineage to hold fire in their hands? What does “good fire” mean to you? These are just some of the questions we asked ourselves and each other as we—chamber musicians, a composer, a poet, and a videographer—immersed ourselves in the world of fire. Audio Recorded & Mixed by Scott Padden. Filmed by Rob Wadleigh. Produced and Edited by Max Savage. Colored by V Tran.
October 2024 - Voces del Fuego (Voices of Fire) Documentary
July 2024, Fire Learning Networks // FLN and WRTC: A Commitment to Fire Adaptation
“In 2006, when WRTC was invited to join the Fire Learning Network, we really didn't have any fire-forward programming. We were working on forest restoration and community fire protection, and we were very much going at it from the angle of mechanical thinning, chainsaws, and heavy equipment. We were missing the reintroduction of fire as a keystone ecological process, as a cost-effective tool to do hazardous fuel reduction - as a tool for restoration and building culture around fire." - Nick Goulette, Executive Co-Director of the Watershed Center
View the Interactive Story Map
January 2024, Fire Adapted Communities Network Blog // Bringing People Together Across Languages: California’s First TREX in Spanish
The Watershed Research and Training Center, FAC Net’s parent organization based in Hayfork, CA, hosted the first Spanish TREX in California, and the 10th overall Spanish TREX, in October 2023.
February 2024, The Watershed Center’s Fire Program 2023 Accomplishments
April 2023, YES Magazine // From Farm Workers to Land Healers
March 2023, Fire Adapted Communities Network Blog // Building a Global Fire Family: An Interview with Andrea Bustos and José Luis Duce Aragüés
“Both Andrea and I have also worked with Miller Bailey and Erin Banwell (Co-Directors of the Fire Management program at the Watershed Center) before. Their vision for the program at the Watershed Center was expanding and growing and included a focus on workforce development. So, they contacted us – and I guess our vision of fire from different perspectives and also our values of working directly with communities fit well with their goals for the program in California. They saw our passion for fire and working to empower people around fire.” - José Aragüés, Prescribed Fire Training Specialist
February 2023, The Watershed Center’s Fire Program 2022 Accomplishments
June 2022, North State Public Radio // Fire Returned Series
Fire Returned is a series about some of the people working to restore Butte County by bringing intentional fire back to it.
Listen to the Fire Returned Series Listen to Erin Banwell in “Fire is For Everyone”
April 2022, North Coast Resource Partnership // Story Map: North Coast All Hands All Lands Prescribed Fire Team
The All Hands All Lands team was composed of the Watershed Research and Training Center, Mid Klamath Watershed Council, the Karuk Tribe, and the Siskiyou Prescribed Burn Association. The All Hands All Lands team worked together to develop a shared Regional Project Database of burn opportunities, needs and resources (including personnel, qualifications, and equipment), and training events within the pilot area. This database is a "living document" and will continue to be expanded and updated into the future.
View the Interactive Story Map
April 2021, North State Public Radio // Learn and Burn
“One entity cannot do prescribed fire, it really is a cooperative effort with multiple partners, lots of different people coming to help: volunteer fire departments, the U.S. Forest Service, nonprofits, community members coming together to get burns done.” - Erin Banwell, Co-Director of Fire Management
Read the Article or Listen to the Podcast
April 2019, Mail Tribune // 'Gold Star' Example of FireWise
“Community fire adaption is not relegated to one sector of society. It’s not just the fire department’s responsibility to help our communities live more safely in wildfire. We need to bring together all of the different institutions and community stakeholders that have a role and a responsibility together to cooperate and leverage their work.” - Nick Goulette, Executive Co-Director of the Watershed Center
Forestry and Fuels Work
August 2024, SF Gate // Calif. Groups Buy 11,000 Acres from Timber Company to Protect Huge Reservoir
A San Francisco nonprofit has purchased 11,000 acres of land at the headwaters of the Trinity River from a timber company, aimed at protecting the source of the massive Trinity Reservoir. The Pacific Forest Trust spent $15.5 million on the checkerboard of properties before transferring their ownership to a local nonprofit, the Watershed Research and Training Center.
July 2019, Redding Record Searchlight // In an Old Logging Town, 'You Have the Risk of What Happened in Paradise'
June 2019, KQED-SCIENCE // Town Unites Against Federal Mismanagement to Save Forest
“There will be fire on this entire landscape. Do we want it to be controlled, or do we want it to be out of control? We need to leave these forests ready to accept fire.” - Alex Cousins, a lifelong Trinity county resident
Watershed Stewardship Work
October 2024, Pacific Forest Trust // Trinity Headwaters Resilience Forest Conservation Partnership
“The Pacific Forest Trust and the Watershed Research and Training Center are teaming up to acquire the Trinity Headwaters from Acer Klamath Forest, LLC, a major forest owner in the region. This partnership will ensure the property’s permanent protection under a Working Forest Conservation Easement held by PFT that will guide careful management by the WRTC for watershed benefits, biodiversity, more climate resilient forests, and lasting connections with public lands.”
February 2020, San Francisco Chronicle // Yurok Tribe Revives Ancestral Lands by Restoring Salmon Runs, Protecting Wildlife
“We’re trying to help restore balance to the river, with help from the Watershed Research and Training Center, the U.S. Forest Service, and local landowners. We’re adding a natural element and letting nature take its course.” - Aaron Martin, Habitat Restoration Biologist for the Yurok Indian Tribe
Recreation Updates
August 2019, Redheaded Blackbelt // Youth Conservation Crews Restore South Fork National Recreation Trail
For the past 15 years, the Watershed Research and Training Center’s Youth Conservation Crew (YCC) has been working with the Forest Service to restore and maintain trails in the Yolla-Bolly and Chanchelulla Wildernesses as well as a portion of the South Fork National Recreation Trail. In addition to maintaining the 18-mile South Fork National Recreation Trail along the beautiful South Fork Trinity River, crews have continued working to improve access to the main trail from the Smokey Creek Trail, Rough Gulch Rough, Snow Gap Trail, St. Jaques Trail and Dog Gulch Trail. Funding for these YCC projects was in part from a California Off-Highway Vehicle Restoration grant.