The 2024 William Main Seminar
Woody Biomass Utilization in California
Select Tuesdays from 4:00-5:30pm, Spring 2024
Mulford Hall, Room 132
Innovative wood products can support carbon-beneficial, sustainable forest management in California. Their development and deployment can help the state increase the pace and scale of forest management and restoration efforts needed to address the problems of overstocked forests and climate change. Recent bills and agreements put into place by the state will require huge reductions in forest fuels each year. While some of that will be accomplished with prescribed fire, much of it will require mechanical thinning that will generate millions of tons of woody biomass per year. There are numerous innovative products with sufficient commercial and technical readiness, and potential market share, to justify increased public and private investments in their development.
This year's William Main Seminar Series will explore wood processing infrastructure, capability and development in California, focusing on topics like assessing the current processing infrastructure in CA, non-traditional timber utilization, small diameter biomass utilization for energy & beyond, expanding small diameter biomass utilization in CA, and barriers to creating new wood industries in CA. Subject matter experts and on-the-ground practitioners will join us on Tuesdays through the end of the 2024 spring semester.
Full speaker roster: 
William_Main_Seminar_Roster_of_Speakers (1).pdf
Additional information here.
The 2023 William Main Seminar
Silviculture for Ecological and Alternative Objectives
Select Wednesdays Spring 2023
Mulford Hall, Room 103
This year's seminar centers around the concept of silviculture for ecological and alternative objectives, and will explore how the goals of forest management have shifted in the past decade. With forests throughout the US experiencing an extreme disruption from natural disturbance regimes (in the form of wildfire, insect outbreaks, type conversion, mesophication, and more), many landowners have shifted the primary objective of their land management away from timber production to focus more on management that creates a resilient forest that may or may not also produce commercially valuable logs. This seminar will feature both academics and field-based practitioners to investigate the ways in which foresters can utilize novel and traditional silvicultural systems to meet ecological and other alternative objectives.
More information on this years seminar series can be found here.
The 2022 SJ Hall Lecture in Industrial Forestry
Statewide Forestry Initiatives and their Impact on Industrial Forest Management
November 4th, 2022 @ 4:00pm,
Mulford Hall, Room 159
We are excited to announce that the SJ Hall Lecture in Industrial Forestry will be held in person after two years of virtual lecutres!
The 2022 SJ Hall Lecture in Industrial Forestry is excited to welcome CNRA's Deputy Secretary of Forest and Wildland Resilience, Jessica Morse, to present about statewide forestry and wildfire initiatives, and how these initiatives impact industrial forest management in our state. Deputy Secretary Morse will share insights about California's Wildfire and Forest Resilience Plan and the Natural Working Lands Climate Smart Strategy, and the ways in these efforts interact with management of our private timberlands. She will also discuss the Nature Based Solutions Executive Order N-82-20, its efforts to conserve 30 percent of our lands and coastal waters by 2030, and the role that actively managed forests can play in achieving 30X30's goals.
A question and answer session with attendees will follow Deputy Morse's presentation.
Berkeley Forests hosts a variety of events on the Berkeley campus, in Sacramento, at its various forest properties, and beyond. For information about upcoming campus events, visit the UC College of Natural Resources calendar. For events at our forests, visit us on Facebook, check the UCANR Forest Research and Outreach events calendar, or contact our Research Station Manager, Ariel Roughton.