What is Lake Oswego Forest Resiliency?

The idea of land resilience and community involvement requires a coupling of social and ecological resilience in rapidly changing  landscapes  affected by our warming climate. Land management is strongest when it adopts multiple perspectives of resilience. Resilient land that is actively managed using a systems based approach can respond to stress events (drought, extreme weather, fires, insect and pathogen invasions) while supporting wildlife populations, healthy soils, and healthy watersheds.

First Stewards

Indigenous peoples successfully cared for this land for millennia prior to European colonization and continue to do so today. The land that we now call Lake Oswego is the homeland of the Clackamas people and other native groups who relied on their natural environment and embedded knowledge of local ecosystems into their worldview,  culture,  food, craftsmanship and storytelling.

Tribes continue to use Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), an on-going accumulation of practices that demonstrate relationships between living beings including people  in a specific ecosystem. The Indigenous use of fire has been a particularly important care-giving tool for maintaining a mosaic of habitat patches that supports forest health by ensuring a productive, biodiverse landscape.

Using charcoal analyses to reconstruct the character of the fire regimes that existed in Lake Oswego, Western researchers are finding out more about how indigenous peoples deliberately used fire to shape the land. Their methods of controlled burning to enhance ecosystem health required extensive knowledge of seasonality and vegetation response. Prescribed fire is often used to mimic the low-intensity fire that would have naturally occurred on the landscape creating a more fire resilient and adapted landscape.

Increased Wildfire Risk in a Changing Climate

Increased forest fire activity across the western United States has been enabled by a number of factors, one of the leading being the pattern of increasing temperatures, a key indicator of human-caused climate change. Prolonged drought and heat evaporate moisture from the soil and vegetation making forested areas more vulnerable to igniting. Wildfires are burning hotter and more frequently, and as urban populations continue to grow and create new rural boundaries, fire will become a large part of the changing landscape.

Many communities in Lake Oswego lie within the wildland-urban interface. Decades of deferred maintenance, tree damage and woody debris from the 2021 ice storms, combined with periods of prolonged drought, progressing climate change, and the buildup of invasive plant materials have created conditions conducive to wildfire risk.

Steep slopes, dense non-native vegetation, and the interface between wildland and urban areas present high risk for wildfires. A forested area that is mainly confined to steep slopes that are topped by the residential areas  increases the likelihood that a wildfire could develop with catastrophic results to residences – a single cigarette or coal from a barbecue has the potential to start a catastrophic wildfire in these conditions.

Small test plot where Mountain Park Home Owners Association (MPHOA) staff removed invasive shrubs and small trees, and replanted the area with fire resistant native species.