A refrigerated warehouse on the edge of Davis holds something surprising: roughly 42,000 pounds of tree seeds, some more than 50 years old, stored in cardboard boxes inside a walk-in freezer that smells faintly of pine and snow.
“This is like the mothership of forestry in California right here,” said Stewart McMorrow, staff chief for wildfire resilience at Cal Fire, standing outside the seed bank at the agency’s Lewis A. Moran Reforestation Center.
Those frozen seeds are the backbone of California’s effort to regrow forests after wildfire, particularly for private landowners who depend on them to replant scorched property. But by the state’s own estimates, the supply isn’t close to sufficient for the scale of destruction California is now experiencing.
Decades of fire suppression combined with a warming climate have produced wildfires so intense that they are killing off forests that once depended on periodic, low-intensity fire to regenerate. Instead of bouncing back, some of these iconic California landscapes are transforming permanently into brush and scrubland.
Over the past 25 years, severe wildfires have scorched roughly 2.3 million acres of California forest so thoroughly that natural regrowth is unlikely, according to a working draft of the state’s new reforestation strategy obtained by CalMatters. That’s a serious problem for a state counting on its forests to store carbon, safeguard water supplies, filter air pollution and provide wildlife habitat. One recent analysis projects that by 2071, California could lose half of its existing forestland.
“Reforestation,” said Malcolm North, a research scientist with the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Southwest Research Station, “is pretty damn important.”
Yet Cal Fire estimates the state would need to roughly triple its seed bank capacity just to replant a quarter of the privately owned forestland that needs it — a tall order requiring more seeds, more storage, and more workers. And that doesn’t even touch federal land, which makes up more than half of California’s forests and accounts for most of the acreage awaiting replanting.
CalMatters reviewed the draft strategy, which is being developed by the USDA California Climate Hub alongside state and federal agencies, the nonprofit American Forests, and the Governor’s Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force. For decades, though, both Sacramento and Washington have allowed the funding and staffing needed for large-scale reforestation to erode.
“We need to focus on reforestation as an emergency, as a state,” McMorrow said. “We are slowly losing our forestland, and we’re not catching up.”
**A shrinking federal workforce**
Timber sales once financed much of the Forest Service’s replanting work. But as endangered species protections and other environmental rules tightened logging on national forests, and wildfires grew larger and more destructive, the agency’s budget and staffing took a hit. Non-fire personnel responsible for managing national forest lands dropped by nearly 40% between 1998 and 2015, according to a 2015 federal report.
A 2022 Forest Service document warned of a “critical need” for more staff dedicated specifically to reforestation work. Congress and the Biden administration responded in 2021 by boosting funding for a federal reforestation trust fund, a push backed by American Forests. Within a few years, the agency reported replanting about 285,000 acres nationwide in a single year — the highest total in more than 25 years.
Still, the need vastly outpaces what’s being done, and the process itself is slow. Crews first must remove dead and dying trees to reduce safety hazards and prevent future fires from reburning the same ground, according to a Forest Service spokesperson. Sourcing seeds and growing seedlings can then take another year or two before any planting begins.
Solomon Dobrowski, a landscape ecology professor at the University of Montana, said the federal government’s reforestation capacity didn’t disappear overnight — and won’t come back quickly, either. His research found that the reforestation backlog spans millions of acres across the West and could double or triple in coming decades.
“You don’t turn that ship around on a dime,” Dobrowski said.
Instead, the Trump administration slashed Forest Service staffing by 20% last year.
“It just makes me cry at night … it’s basically a child swinging a wrecking ball,” said Hugh Safford, a fire ecologist at UC Davis and former Forest Service regional ecologist. “Morale is down, capacity already was really minimal.”
Meanwhile, the fires keep coming.
**The gap keeps growing**
“This is one of the least-known impacts of climate change and megafires,” said Patrick Wright, director of the state’s wildfire task force, referring to forest loss.
The draft strategy obtained by CalMatters doesn’t come with dedicated funding attached. Instead, Wright said, its purpose is to get every agency and organization involved in reforestation working from the same playbook — streamlining permitting, prioritizing projects that protect water supplies and public safety, and expanding the pipeline of seeds, seedlings and trained workers.
It also encourages land managers to plant trees at lower densities with more natural spacing, moving away from the traditional tightly packed rows of seedlings. Researchers have linked dense plantings to more severe wildfires down the road.
The most sobering numbers in the draft concern the current pace of work. To meet the state’s existing post-fire replanting targets — which call for 280,000 acres per year starting in 2030 — California would need to expand its reforestation efforts by 35% annually. That kind of expansion would require substantial new funding, the report notes, since replanting can cost as much as $6,400 per acre.
Right now, the state is falling well short. Since 2020, land managers have replanted about 254,000 acres of severely burned forest — only around 16% of the forestland stripped bare by high-severity fire between 2020 and 2024. On federal land outside designated wilderness, the figure drops to just 8%.
Safford’s own research paints an even bleaker picture. Once wilderness areas and forests likely to regrow naturally are factored in, his recent study found the Forest Service replanted only 1.2% of its California lands burned by high-severity wildfire between 2016 and 2023.
It wasn’t always this way, Safford said. Replanting efforts largely kept up with wildfire losses until around 2006.
“And then,” he said, “it just falls to shit.”
**‘Nowhere near prepared’**
Despite public sparring between Gov. Gavin Newsom and President Donald Trump over forest management, state and federal reforestation efforts — and funding — often overlap on the ground.
Cal Fire funds research, issues grants for forest restoration on private, state and even federal land, and operates the Davis reforestation center, where rows of young conifer seedlings get misted in the summer heat.
McMorrow, dressed in Cal Fire’s navy uniform, can’t resist pulling weeds from around the seedlings as he walks the nursery rows.
One of the biggest bottlenecks, he said, is simply gathering enough seeds — getting trained climbers to the right trees at the right moment to collect ripe cones before they fall or rot.
“Believe me, I do it,” said McMorrow, who helped launch Cal Fire’s tree-climbing program. “We are trying to meet the demand that’s in front of us, and it’s crushing.”
Even so, the funding for Cal Fire’s reforestation work — pieced together from the state budget, federal grants and one-time allocations — remains a small and unpredictable slice of the agency’s multibillion-dollar budget.
The Davis facility actually shut down in the early 2000s amid statewide budget cuts, though the seed bank freezer kept running. It didn’t fully reopen until 2017, after lawmakers redirected a 2012 fee on wood products to bring it back to life. Now, upgrading and expanding the center carries an estimated $26.2 million price tag; this year’s state budget allocated just $1.2 million for preliminary planning.
Other funding sources are also uncertain. In May, California’s climate regulators — led by Newsom appointee Lauren Sanchez — voted to overhaul a major climate program in ways that could slash or eliminate up to $200 million a year earmarked for wildfire resilience, with reforestation grants competing against many other priorities for what remains. And while the Proposition 4 climate bond includes $1.5 billion for wildfire and forest resilience, state leaders are already spending it down quickly.
“The truth of the matter is that California is probably, infrastructurally speaking, in a better place than any other western state,” Safford said. “What that tells you is how piss-poor the capacity is in general in the Western U.S., because California is nowhere near prepared for the scale of this.”
**Hunting for cones**
On the shores of Jenkinson Lake in the Sierra Nevada foothills, Stella Krone and Elyse Wohlenberg wrestled with an oversized slingshot nearly as tall as they were, working together to stretch the bungee cord into place before Wohlenberg stepped clear.
“All clear?” Krone called out, aiming the slingshot toward a Douglas fir some 50 yards off. “Firing!”
Krone, Wohlenberg and dozens of others — some forestry professionals, others simply curious — had gathered for Cone Camp, a training program run by American Forests with support from Cal Fire and the U.S. Forest Service. Participants fanned out across the forest with slingshots and modified potato guns, learning to knock loose pine cones to check for ripeness before sending climbers up to harvest them for the seed bank.
But this year, cones were scarce. As Krone and another participant tugged on a rope slung over the canopy, only a scattering of last season’s dried-out cones dropped to the forest floor.
“So far, not a great cone year,” said Leana Weissberg, American Forests’ California director.
Undeterred, the group regrouped and moved on to try their luck at another tree.
“Let’s go,” Krone said. “We’re cone hunters for a reason.”
Original source: CalMatters
