California’s experiment with beating back mega-fires

Looking at photos of an un-thinned, un-burned control woodland in the Stanislaus-Tuolumne Experimental Forest, you see kindling, perfect fuel for a raging fire.
But just around the corner in the central Sierra Nevada region, reports Lisa M. Krieger of our sister paper the San Jose Mercury, are stands of sugar pines that have been thinned using a “clustered” approach, breaking up both the pattern of the larger trees as well as clearing entirely the easy-to-ignite undergrowth.
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