Recovery from the Hermit’s Peak-Calf Canyon Fire has been daunting. Residents are still waiting for disaster relief payments even as floods sweep through the ashy burn scar, contaminating the drinking water downstream. And then there’s the forest itself: in desperate need of new trees but lacking the necessary seedlings.
Wildfires have burned 7 million acres across New Mexico since 2000, and millions of seedlings are needed to replant the burned areas. The Hermit’s Peak-Calf Canyon Fire alone, the largest in state history, needs 17.6 million seedlings. Trees play an integral role in restabilizing burned hillsides and protecting the drinking water sources below them. But current reforestation facilities lack the capacity to keep up with demand, creating a dire shortage. Experts estimate it would take 50 years to replant the Hermit’s Peak-Calf Canyon burn scar at current rates.
That’s where the New Mexico Reforestation Center comes in. Conceived in 2022 as a collaboration between the state Forestry Division, University of New Mexico, New Mexico State University and New Mexico Highlands University, the center is now about to break ground on an “absolutely massive” greenhouse facility that expands existing infrastructure in the northwestern part of the state, Director Jennifer Auchter told High Country News.
The greenhouses, which will eventually total 155,000 square feet in size, are an essential part of the seed-to-seedling-to-tree post-fire reforestation pipeline, which involves processing over 1,500 pounds of native seed for future planting while researching ways to help seedlings survive an even hotter and drier future. (The enterprise has a uniquely New Mexican flavor: Auchter said that a repurposed chili roaster is used to extract seeds from cones and pods at the existing seed-processing facility.)
High Country News caught up with Auchter in mid-April as she prepared for the greenhouse groundbreaking to talk about how the center will more than triple the state’s current seedling production capacity and why a “right tree, right place” approach is important for the success of modern reforestation.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
High Country News: Why is re-planting a forest after a wildfire so important?
Jennifer Auchter: This is my favorite part of the whole story. My background is in earth science, watershed management, fluvial systems and that sort of thing. So I think about this from a “forest being water infrastructure” perspective, particularly in New Mexico and the Southwest. Here, it’s the snowpack in the winter that feeds our rivers and streams. People have tried to quantify this a bunch of different ways, but it’s something like 70% of all the water we use is coming from a forest, whether it’s the snowpack or the precipitation that streams capture.
The likelihood of a forest actually regenerating (after a high-severity wildfire) is not very likely in our lifetimes. It could be decades to even centuries. For us, because of our water infrastructure here, we really need to conserve forests even just to have a water source.
High Country News: What are New Mexico’s current reforestation needs, given several large wildfires in recent years?
Jennifer Auchter: The state’s current burn scars need 7 million trees, and that doesn’t include future wildfires. That’s just the existing backlog.
The state’s current burn scars need 7 million trees, and that doesn’t include future wildfires.
HCN: How many seedlings can current operations in New Mexico grow right now? Tell us about the gap the New Mexico Reforestation Center is seeking to fill.
JA: We say 300,000, but we don’t even usually hit that mark. It’s usually more like 250,000 seedlings per year, and those are grown at the John T. Harrington Forestry Research Center, which is a pretty small and pretty old nursery.
Most of our tree seedlings are purchased from growers in Idaho. That’s not terrible, but they’re not exactly from the right climate, they’re not exactly from the right elevation, and then when they travel over land, they don’t do as well in planting. They’re kind of shocked when they get here.
HCN: What kind of research has been going on to help set the New Mexico Reforestation Center and its replanting efforts up for success?
JA: What the University of New Mexico is responsible for is doing a lot of the research on modeling: predicting seedling survival based on the site and based on the projected climate. So, when we’re selecting sites and planting out trees, we’re actually doing this for the 2100 climate, not for today’s climate. We want to make sure that these trees are surviving long-term. Then, once they plant it out, they will also do monitoring with drones, and on-the-ground monitoring as well.
HCN: How else are researchers trying to ensure seedlings can survive in hotter, drier conditions?
JA: New Mexico State University researchers are doing drought conditioning, so putting the seedlings under a lower amount of irrigation. They’re drought-stressing ponderosa pine and some of the other species as seedlings, so that when they plant them out, they are ready for that dry environment. There’s another thing that they’re doing specifically for aspen seedling survival in a post-fire environment: planting the seedling next to a log, for example, and trying to give it just a bit of shade while it’s in those early establishing months and years. They’re seeing higher survival for the seedlings that are planted in the shade areas.
There’s a lot of research going on to try to optimize this, bigger-scale. Once we jump from 300,000 seedlings to 5 million seedlings, ideally, by that time, we will have sorted out the very best methods that are the most successful across the whole reforestation pipeline, from seeds to seedling to planting.
HCN: Did you look to any other states for reforestation inspiration? What did you learn?
JA: The Pacific Northwest is really great at reforesting. At least in the early days, I think there was an idea that we would model reforestation in the Southwest after reforestation in the Pacific Northwest. But we really just need to have our own regionally tailored methods, regionally appropriate stock — the genetics of the seedling — all of that is really important.
HCN: How will the new forestry center benefit the broader region?
JA: We do anticipate that, particularly in other areas of the Four Corners states, our seedlings will be appropriate. For example, northern Arizona, Flagstaff — that’s a similar elevation, similar species. That could be said for some areas of Colorado as well. So, I think we probably will focus on New Mexico first, but we do expect to actually be able to provide more seedlings longer term, once we start reforesting our own burn scars.
There’s not an official sort of hub or resource collaboration for the Southwest. There are a lot of groups working here — NGOs, government agencies, universities — there’s a lot of people doing a lot of different things, but they’re generally pretty disjointed. We envision the NMRC bringing those people together.
HCN: What’s an important part of the reforestation process that’s sometimes overlooked?
JA: I think it’s important to highlight the whole reforestation pipeline. The seed collection work that New Mexico Highlands University does is sort of this hidden part of it, right? The greenhouses and the seedlings are flashy, and it’s easy to take pictures and cover that, but the seed collection work is tedious, time-consuming and requires a massive labor development approach. It’s rugged, it’s hard.
HCN: What do you wish more people knew about reforestation?
JA: I’ve heard a couple of different times, “Wow, that’s an expensive greenhouse.” It’s really not just a greenhouse. There’s so much more that goes into building a forest. It’s quite a daunting action, bringing that to the forefront in any way we can, raising awareness of how many bodies have touched the seed or the seedling or planted it out from the time that seed is collected to when it’s actually growing.
HCN: What kind of long-lasting impact can reforestation have on a community post-fire, and how are you going about that in New Mexico?
JA: I’ll use one example that we just finished last week. We had 48 students across grades from a charter school near Mora come to the seed collection facility, and we had the kids, who lived through wildfire, create a piece of art that was something special to them. During this whole workshop, while they were creating this art, we had some of our forestry experts talk about just the process of reforestation and what all goes into it. The point of it is really to get kids engaged locally at a younger age, so that as they go through school next year, those same kids will come back and get to see maybe some of the seeds they worked with are now in pots as seedlings, and maybe in three years, they get to go see that tree planted out in the forest. Keeping them engaged along the whole timeline of reforestation, to sort of imprint upon them how important conservation is. Because once it’s gone, it takes a long time to bring it back.
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