Effectiveness of Post-Fire Restoration Structures

In the wake of the 2022 Calf Canyon/Hermit’s Peak wildfire, watershed restoration structures made from site-sourced natural materials such as logs and stones were installed throughout the Santa Fe National Forest to help mitigate post-fire erosion impacts.

This month’s speaker, Tomas Gonzales, helped build some of these structures in the summer of 2024 and then began monitoring them for an undergraduate research project during the next semester. He is still continuing to measure their effectiveness at fulfilling their intended functions of erosion control within the ephemeral drainages where they are placed. With over a year of monitoring data, Tomas has collected some valuable insights into how structure placement and design impacts their effectiveness, and he has documented some potential long-term positive and negative effects on the ecosystem. Tomas will share these insights during this month’s presentation so that we can better understand an exciting adaptive management practice being used in the field today.

Speaker Bio: Tomas Gonzales
Tomas Gonzales is an undergraduate forestry student at New Mexico Highlands University, specializing in watershed resilience, ecological restoration, and land–water interactions in New Mexico. He has presented his research at multiple ecology talks and conferences over the past two years, most recently at the Society of Wetland Scientists, which was held in Denver in May 2026.