Los Padres Forest approves large scale Wildfire Risk Reduction Project

The Los Padres Forest Service has approved the Wildfire Risk Reduction Project, moving forward a wide scale effort to conduct fire suppression across six counties, including Santa Barbara County. 

The project includes fuel treatment and fire suppression actions across 33,023 acres of the national forest. There will be no environmental impact statement prepared for the project.

In the assessment of the project, the Forest Service found that the project had no significant impact on the environment. The Service defines impact as: “The degree of effects of the specific action on the potentially affected environment.”

Chaparral in danger

The methods of fuel treatment have sparked the concern of conservationists due to the harm it could cause to native plant communities such as chaparral.

Chaparral is a plant community of dense, shrub-like plants, ranging from three to 10 feet tall. While it is only found in a few regions of the world, chaparral grows abundantly in Santa Barbara County. However, the ecosystem is slowly being converted to grassland around the world. 

In the Los Padres forest, one of the largest pockets of intact chaparral remains.

In Santa Barbara County, the plant type is vulnerable to fires. Especially as the time interval between fires decreases and their intensity increases.

But as these fires continue to pose a risk, the Forest Service says that it isn’t a possibility to just let them burn in the back country. 

Wildland fires are destroying communities around California and reaching new record breaking sizes every year. In 2017, the Thomas Fire in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties topped the list for biggest fires in history—at over 280,000 acres. Nine years later, it barely remains in the top 10.

These fires pose a significant threat to people as well, placing structures and lives at risk.

And chaparral is also vulnerable to fires at the increased rate. The natural fire interval for chaparral is 30 to 120 years. With recent increased fire frequency, it can be lucky to get a decade between fires—not enough time for chaparral to regrow and restore its seed banks.

Fire suppression and chaparral

To try and tackle these fires before they start, the Los Padres Forest Service is moving forward with the Wildfire Risk Reduction Project. The project looks to implement fire suppression methods such as fuel treatments and fire breaks.

But fire breaks and fuel treatments can permanently remove chaparral from the environment. 

Once the chaparral is removed, non-native, highly flammable grasses grow instead.

In June the News-Press spoke with Matt Kay, a Santa Barbara City College professor of biology, about the potential impacts on chaparral and the resulting impacts on the environment.

Kay said it is highly unlikely that chaparral will ever be able to return where invasive grasses have grown. This is known as type conversion.
 

On its own, chaparral isn’t as flammable as commonly believed. With higher moisture content, the plant type, which grows up to 8-12 feet in height, doesn’t spark as easily as non-native grasses. However, once a fire has been lit, it can burn intensely.

“These grasses are the wick, the chaparral is the bomb,” Kay said. 

While from a passing gaze, chaparral might not look as impressive as towering redwoods or blooming fields of flowers—the ecosystem provides a critical service. Kay said that mature chaparral communities help stabilize the ground, reducing the risk of flooding and landslides.

“We’re losing all those ecosystem services, all those benefits to humans from those chaparral, and we’re punching in these corridors of invasive grasses,” Kay said.

Staff from the Forest Service also discussed the risk of type conversion.

“Once an area starts to convert, there is a positive feedback loop,” said Benjamin Vizzachero, a wildlife biologist with the Forest Service. He spent several months working on the environmental assessment for the Wildfire Risk Reduction Plan.

Fuel breaks

The Wildfire Risk Reduction Project includes a multitude of fire suppression techniques from targeted grazing to controlled burns. 

But one of the standard images of fire suppression is a fuel break—an intentional gap in the brush, usually 10-20 feet wide, running in a line along a ridge. Fire breaks serve a few key purposes: They serve as points to slow the fire, access points for firefighters and gaps in fuel that the fire can burn.

Rudy Uribe, a wildland fuels planner with the Forest Service, also said that fire retardant is more effective on the non-native grasses that grow in these fuel breaks.

The Service said that the project has been revised to not create any new fuel breaks.

“Most of the fuel breaks in this forest were carved out 100 years ago,” Vizzachero said. The plan will be to maintain and open up the current fuel breaks.

“There’s very few areas where we are charging into a virgin chaparral ecosystem and cutting it up,’ Uribe said. 

Revisions and approval

In June 2026, the project was designated as an authorized emergency action, streamlining the process to approval by bypassing an objection period.

Along with not creating any new fuel breaks, the scale of the project has also been dramatically reduced over the last couple of years—which was a main public concern when the project was first drafted in 2022. 

The initial project was to prescribe fuel treatments and fire suppression methods across over 200,000 acres of the Los Padres Forest.

The Forest Service said the large scale was to give themselves the ability to conduct fuel treatment on that land—not necessarily to conduct treatment on all of it.

“We took a lot of feedback from the public and our critics,” Uribe said. 

Non-profit groups, such as the Los Padres Forest Watch, even publicly released alternative plans to the project.

After several years of scaling back in the wake of public comment and feedback, the project that was approved this October will be for 33,000 acres of forest across six counties. The implementation of the project will take place over the next two decades.

“If we can reduce the footprint of the fire, that’s going to reduce the footprint of suppression activity,” Uribe said.