May 20th at 4PM PDT: The Sierra Club Presents, Forest Protection Forum

The Sierra Club presents: Dr. JP O’Brien, on "Jackson Demonstration State Forest: History and management within the broader context of the redwood region and climate change impacts to forest resources”

Register HERE to attend.

Talk Description: JDSF is a nearly 50,000 acre expanse of Public land situated within the coast redwood bioregion. Since being purchased by California from Caspar Lumber Company in 1947, JDSF has been, and still is, managed by the state primarily for timber production. This talk will focus on the history of the state's management and the legacy that has left. We will use two independent LiDAR datasets to contextualize present forest conditions within the broader north coast redwood ecosystem and quantitative inventory/harvest data to understand how the forest came to look how it does today. Finally, we will take stock of the current state of climate change to understand how forest resources have and may continue to be impacted for JDSF specifically and the redwood bioregion as a whole.

Bio: JP is a Northern California native, raised in the mountains of Trinity County, where he also worked as a wilderness patrol ranger in the Trinity Alps. Subsequently, JP earned a Bachelor of Science in applied physics, a graduate certificate in applied spatial statistics, and a Ph.D. in climate and atmospheric science. He did his postdoctoral work in the Climate and Global Dynamics Division at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in Boulder, Colorado and is currently a research affiliate at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory within the Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division in Berkeley, California.