Past Wildfire Resilient Programs & Services

The Resource Conservation District of the Santa Monica Mountains has been working to create more fire resilient communities across and beyond our mountains for many years. 

Our projects are often dependent on grant funding. In the past we have been able to offer the following programs to our community:

• Hazardous Vegetation Removal – a program that reduced wildfire risk by replacing non-native vegetation in hazardous locations around a home or structure with native vegetation in safer areas on the property, helping to reduce the risk of ignition and improve habitat quality in areas vulnerable to wildfires. Funded through a grant by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.
• Community Chipping & Mulch Program – this program helped homeowners and residents prepare for wildfire by removing hazardous vegetation, providing chipping services to existing vegetation, helping the homeowner create resulting chipping piles, encouraging homewoners to mix piles with high quality compost and incorporate resulting mulch into their landscape to improve overall habitat quality. This program was funded through a grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.
• Defensible Landscape Consultations – these consultations included a review of a homeowners landscape by a landscape architect as well as a Home Ignition Zone evaluation, after which homeowners received a site-specific design plan and a list of suggested native plants for their property.
• Zone Zero Retrofit – Contractors removed combustible vegetation within Zone Zero (first 5 feet around the home) and replaced it with attractive permeable hardscape, creating a stress-free buffer around homes where embers will self-extinguish if they land there.

We hope to bring projects like the ones above back with new competitively sought grant funding as well as create new offerings in this ever adapting field as we continue to learn and grow alongside our community. 

To discover current offerings and programs, head back to the Wildfire Resilient Resources homepage.