Thinning and Prescribed Fire in the Santa Fe Municipal Watershed: Protecting Water Quality; Increasing Water Yield?

摘要

The City of Santa Fe maintains two reservoirs in the municipal watershed that supply 40 per cent of the City’s water. By the end of the 20th century, the forest in that watershed had become so overgrown that it presented an extreme fire risk, threatening the viability of those reservoirs. Consequently, beginning in 1998 Santa Fe National Forest initiated a project to thin out the watershed. To increase the confidence of the community that the project would be carried out in an ecologically sensitive fashion, a commitment was made that thinning and burning treatments would be monitored for ecosystem response.