Healing Burned Parks: What Infrastructure-Law Money Did After Wildfires in 2023

After a wildfire, the danger isn’t over. Flash floods, debris flows and erosion threaten what survived, invasive plants move into bare ground, and some land won’t recover on its own. The National Park Service pays for that work through Emergency Stabilization (also called Burned Area Emergency Response, or BAER) and Burned Area Rehabilitation (BAR) funds. In fiscal year 2023, 24 national parks received both kinds of help for approximately 34 fires.

New money from the infrastructure law

The Park Service worked with other Interior Department bureaus and the Office of Wildland Fire on a spending plan for Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) money for burned-area recovery. For FY24 it offered two rounds of funding: $33 million for plant materials ahead of future fires, and $11 million to restore areas 5–10 years after a fire.

What got done in 2023

BIL burned-area funds paid for on-the-ground restoration after seven fires in five parks — Hawaiʻi Volcanoes, Lassen Volcanic, North Cascades, Sequoia and Kings Canyon, and Yosemite:

• 2,822 acres of burned land surveyed for invasive plants, and 470 net acres treated
• 1,760 feet of fence to keep out hoofed animals, and 7 miles of boundary fence, replaced
• 151 miles of trail stabilized and 4 trail bridges replaced
• 135,500 giant sequoia and other conifer seedlings grown for planting in early FY24
• 150,000 mixed conifer seedlings grown for habitat of the federally listed Pacific fisher
• 112 sugar pines protected with verbenone
• 34 acres of conservation plantings replaced
• 5 acres of federally listed whitebark pine habitat prepared for replanting

Park by park

Park staff load herbicide to spray invasive plants in a burned area. Image from NPS’s page.

Hawaiʻi Volcanoes — Powerline Fire. A helicopter made three herbicide applications against invasive banana poka (Passiflora tarminiana) across the 43-acre burn, plus nearby disturbed land that could reseed it. Ground crews then hand-sprayed seedlings and survivors, controlling 2,075 invasive plants. Fire-damaged sections of hoofed-animal fence — 1,760 feet — were replaced, and the old material recycled.

Lassen Volcanic — Dixie Fire. Crews found invasive plants on 2,064 acres and treated 110.45 infested acres; an explosion of invasives that season led the park to plan bigger crews. They replaced four trail bridges, stabilized 131 miles of fire-damaged trail, and re-established six miles of boundary to keep out trespassing cattle. Hazardous-waste cleanup still blocked work at several trail sites.

Sequoia and Kings Canyon — Castle and Rattlesnake Fires. 12,500 giant sequoia and conifer seedlings were contract-grown for the 48-acre high-severity part of Board Camp Grove. Some seed came deliberately from groves outside the local genetic neighborhood — harsher sites, to help the trees adapt to climate change, and larger groves with more genetic diversity. UC Berkeley designed monitoring to measure how well the plantings do.

Park staff treating invasive plants within the fire perimeter of the Washburn Fire. NPS.

Sequoia and Kings Canyon — KNP Complex. Park staff and an American Conservation Experience youth corps rebuilt all 5,100 feet of a boundary fence between January and June 2023, despite road closures, landslides and atmospheric-river storms. At Tunnel Rock, 34 acres of plantings were replaced with help from Bank of the Sierra and the nonprofit One Tree Planted. 150,000 seedlings of three pine species were grown for the Pacific fisher corridor — needed, since surveys in FY22 and FY23 found 40% of plots with no mixed conifer seedlings at all — plus 123,000 more giant sequoia and pine seedlings, also drawn partly from harsher, more diverse groves.

American Conservation Experience and NPS crews rebuild the North Fork boundary fence. Image from NPS’s page.

Yosemite — Washburn Fire. Staff surveyed over 406 acres, treated 67.7 gross infested acres and mapped 1,757 separate non-native plant populations. They protected 112 large sugar pines across 87 acres by applying the beetle-repelling pheromone verbenone, collected 53.72 lbs of native grass seed to grow out in three half-acre fields expected to yield 100–200 lbs of seed for restoration, and repaired 8 miles of trail, reopening all affected trails.

Applying verbenone to a sugar pine in Yosemite to protect it from beetles after the fire. Image from NPS’s page.

Sources

Based on "FY23 Burned Area Rehabilitation – Bipartisan Infrastructure Law Funded Accomplishments for the National Park Service," National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The page gives two sizes for the Pacific fisher planting area (522 and 450 acres), so neither is stated, and its summary rounds Yosemite’s seed figures, so the park’s own numbers are used. Pictures an earlier version of this page left out were restored on 2026-09-26.