The Brief

The destruction of last year’s January fires was devastating. Not just in how they leveled more than 16,000 structures and took at least 31 lives, but also how they stripped bare landscapes that many Southern Californians had become familiar with and had found solace visiting for decades. Hillsides that we’d long seen covered in dense green chaparral and coastal sage scrub were turned to ash, with the charred carcasses of native plants left behind.

However, nature moves fast, especially when there are large patches of open soil, sunlight and water to feed recovery. And recovery is what we're starting to see — both in good and bad ways.

“Recovery begins in the first growing season,” said Jon Keeley, research scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

On recent trips to the Santa Monica and San Gabriel mountains, where the Palisades and Eaton fires burned a year ago, the signs are sprouting.

Manzanitas and oaks are regrowing from the bases of large plants that burned. Smaller, fast-growing showy pentstemon, hairy yerba santa and the pustule-causing poodle-dog bush are thriving now that competition has been removed.

But so are invasive plants like wild oats, bromes and mustard, which account for some of the green up.

What's growing?

A year after the fires, here are the plants you can see in the Eaton and Palisades burn scars.

Invasive Spanish brome growing in the Eaton Fire burn scar in December.

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Jacob Margolis

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LAist

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A year after the Eaton Fire, new growth is sprouting from the base of badly burned plants.

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Jacob Margolis

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Poodle-dog bush, often found on post-fire landscapes, grows in the San Gabriel Mountains in December. Don't touch!

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Jacob Margolis

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Pines scorched by the Eaton Fire near the Mount Wilson radio towers in December.

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Oak resprouts from the base of a larger plant that burned in the Eaton Fire.

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Jacob Margolis

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Penstemon growing in the Eaton Fire burn scar in December.

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Jacob Margolis

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Dried out brome in the Eaton Fire burn scar in December.

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California sagebrush sprouts in the Palisades Fire burn scar in December.

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Jacob Margolis

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Invasive plants are popping up in rocky, often disturbed areas along trails burned by the Palisades Fire.

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Lupine seen growing in the Santa Monica Mountains in December.

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Goldenbush pops up among filaree in the Santa Monica Mountains in December 2025.

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Whether invasive species or natives take root long term depends on a variety of factors, including the age of the plants when they burned and how soon the area burns again, Keeley said.

Some of the Palisades Fire area hadn’t burned in about 60 years, according to state records, which may mean healthy native-plant recovery over the long term.

Walking the area recently, I saw native California sage brush, goldenbush and long leaf bush lupine, with some invasive grasses mixed in.

The Santa Monica Mountains, photographed from Mullholland Drive, on Jan. 21, 2025, just weeks after the Palisades Fire.

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In December 2025, the Santa Monica Mountains are green again, though non-native grasses fill quite a bit of the open space.

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Higher up in the San Gabriels, where the Eaton Fire burn scar has some overlap with the Bobcat (2020) and Station (2009) fires, native plants that have weathered repeated blazes may struggle to recover.

“If the fire occurs in areas that had burned within the last 15 to 25 years, then there's a good chance you're going to lose species," Keeley said. "And if you lose those species, they're replaced by non-native grasses.”

When fire occurs too frequently, native plant seedbanks can be destroyed, making recovery unlikely.

“ We've looked now at 65, 75, something like that, sites around the state over five years, and the pattern is pretty common,” Keeley said.

The nonnative grasses that replace native shrubs can often dry out and catch fire more easily than heartier natives. Shortening the interval between when wildfires can spread across a landscape, further challenging recovery. It’s a pattern that’s been documented across California — from the deserts to the mountains to the coastal hillsides.

Hope for native plants — and hard work

Even where invasive species have taken over, the hard work of conservation can help bring back natives. But fire is an ever-present threat, as Tree People learned.

For the past four years, the environmental conservation organization has been working to help reestablish native species near Castaic Lake. The work was arduous, with volunteers removing invasive plants across a 25-acre site and planting native oaks. And they were seeing good progress — until Jan. 22, 2025, when the Hughes Fire charred more than 10,000 acres, including their work area.

Oak sprouts from the base of a slim trunk in March 2025.

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Alyssa Walker

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Tree People

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A young oak puts out new growth in September 2025.

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“We brought the team out, and everyone was just kind of speechless,” said Alyssa Walker, Tree People’s associate director of conservation.

The site where they’d planted thousands of trees and worked for years was devoid of green.

But they didn’t give up. They watered seedlings they thought had the best chance of survival.

It's working.

They’re seeing the best recovery in areas where they did the most invasive plant clearance, Walker said. The baby oaks have also done remarkably well, as fire-adapted oak trees often do. And sawtooth golden bush, sunflowers, yerba santa and sugarbush, among others, are all making a comeback.

In the areas that had a lower density of invasive prior to the fire, native chamise can be seen regrowing about a year after the Hughes Fire.

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Alyssa Walker

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Tree People

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In an area dominated by invasive annual plants, invasive plants have come back.

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“We've seen things grow back, if not to their existing size, like beyond,” Walker said.

Native plants in areas that had a higher density of invasive plants before the fire are growing slower because of all of the extra competition.

What about mountain lions?

This uncollared mountain lion's habitat appears to be east of the 405 Freeway. Video captured on the morning of Sept. 7, 2019, shows it chasing P-61 in the area east of the freeway.

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Recent data gathered by the National Park Service in the Santa Monica Mountains area shows that since the Palisades Fire, at least one mountain lion, P-125, appears to be avoiding the burned area.

How other mountain lions are behaving is not yet clear, but the Woolsey Fire — which burned nearly 100,000 acres, including in the Santa Monica Mountains — offers insights into lion behavior after large fires.

After that 2018 fire, mountain lions favored areas that hadn’t burned and still had dense vegetative cover they could use to stay hidden and stalk deer, according to tracking data gathered by the Park Service over 15 months after the Woolsey Fire.

The fire squeezed the territorial cats into even smaller areas that are already fragmented by urban development.

“When you look at their post-fire behavior, because so much of the Santa Monicas were burned … they engaged in some riskier behaviors than they may have beforehand,” said Seth Riley, chief wildlife ecologist for the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.

That included crossing roads, one of the deadlier activities for mountain lions in Southern California. As was the case with P-61, who lived in the eastern Santa Monica Mountains.

P-61 crossed the 405 Freeway in the Sepulveda Pass, which is the first and only time that Riley and his colleagues had seen one of their collared lions cross that freeway. When the male lion reached Bel Air, he encountered another male lion, which chased him up a tree. Twenty minutes later, P-61 was killed by a car — crossing the 405 Freeway again.

Of the 11 lions that Riley and his colleagues were tracking around the Woolsey Fire, three died. P-61 was one.

P-74, they assume, got caught in the fire. Another, P-64, who lived in the Simi Hills and fled when the fire came through, was found dead two weeks later with badly burned paws. He chose to head back into the burned area instead of fleeing into neighborhoods full of people, Riley said.

When will normal return?

The Santa Monica Mountains, bisected by Mulholland Drive, about a year after the Palisades Fire. The area on the left was burned by the fire, while the area on the right, full of native vegetation, has not burned since 1944, according to Cal Fire records.

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I met Lawrence Szabo from Venice on a trail in the Santa Monica Mountains in mid-December. He was looking out across a canyon that had started to green up after heavy rains. We were just down the way from an oak tree that serves as a landmark for hikers and cyclists.

“ I've always viewed that oak tree as kind of my chapel,” he said. “I think that's what was the heaviest part of the fires. Not knowing whether it was still there. And then, when I turned the corner the first time and I saw it there, it pulled a tear, and I felt like we could keep going.”

Southern California plant and animal life has long been adapted to fire. Though, in their recovery they face new challenges including climate change, repeated fires and the phenomenon of car exhaust unhelpfully fertilizing plants.

Over the next 10 years, assuming invasive plants don’t take over, native plants will repopulate and spread. And in several decades our hillsides could once again be filled with the dense and beautiful chaparral and coastal sage scrub many of us grew up with.

Some government funding streams for L.A. County’s public health system are drying up, and officials are turning to private philanthropy to fill the gap.

A new privately funded foundation launched Thursday to strengthen public health services after $50 million in federal, state and local funding cuts to the county’s Department of Public Health since early last year.

“It is really a hard day for our community when we have to ask for private donations to fund a public good, but unfortunately, we've lost too much money to not take this important step,” said Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer.

In February, the county’s Public Health Department closed seven clinics, with six remaining open. About half of the patients seen in those clinics are uninsured, according to county officials. The department also cut hundreds of staff positions.

Ferrer is on the board of the new foundation, The Fund for Advancing Public Health LA, which held its first meeting Thursday.

She said the fund will help the county maintain its basic public health infrastructure, including disease prevention, health promotion, environmental health, and emergency response efforts.

Other board members include several health insurance executives, as well as actors Sean Penn and Danny Trejo. Board member Saree Kayne of the R&S Kayne Foundation pledged $150,000 to the fund Thursday. Kayne said she hopes the donation encourages others to give.

The foundation aims to raise $2 million this year.

More cuts expected

L.A. County Supervisor Holly Mitchell said it’s crucial to have an alternative funding stream to protect services for the county's most vulnerable residents.

“We are saving public health,” Mitchell said. “This fund represents a new approach, one that brings together government philanthropy in the private sector to invest in community-based solutions, protect vulnerable populations, and strengthen our public health infrastructure.”

Officials say more public health cuts are coming, through the federal budget law known as the "Big Beautiful Bill," which slashes funding for Medi-Cal.

The county Department of Public Health anticipates losing up to $300 million in revenue over the next three years because of the federal budget bill and other potential funding freezes. Federal funding accounts for almost 50% of the public health budget, according to county officials.

Mitchell also led an effort to put a half-percent county sales tax increase to fund public health on the June ballot.

If approved by voters, that proposal, known as Measure ER, is expected to raise about $1 billion a year for county safety net health services, including about $100 million for the public health department.

Board members

The Fund for Advancing Public Health LA announced its founding board of directors, which includes:

• Dr. Barbara Ferrer, LA County Department of Public Health director
• Debbie I. Chang, Blue Shield of California Foundation CEO
• Sean Penn, actor and co-founder of Community Organized Relief Effort (CORE)
• Martha Santana-Chin, LA Care Health Plan CEO
• Saree Kayne, R&S Kayne Foundation CEO
• Danny Trejo, actor and restaurateur
• Jarrett Barrios, an executive at the American Red Cross
• Dr. Deborah Prothrow-Stith, Charles R. Drew University College of Medicine Dean
• Kristin McCowan, an executive at the Los Angeles Dodgers

The Rose Bowl in Pasadena may be a centenarian, but it’s holding up pretty well as it continues to host events on its way to a starring role in the LA28 Olympics.

But before it can host the soccer final, it needs fixes, especially to the infrastructure serving the bathrooms and drinking fountains. Fears of a toilet backup while in the world’s spotlight led Rep. Laura Friedman to seek federal funds for upgrades. On Thursday she announced she secured just over $1 million.

“Two years from now, athletes around the world are going to compete for gold right where we are standing. This is not the time to find out whether or not these pipes are up to the task,” Friedman said.

The planned work, she added, will lead to improved water flow capacity and water drainage, eliminating the risk of backups and emergency maintenance.

The funds came from the House of Representatives Interior and Environment subcommittee. The fixes, an official said, will be completed by the LA28 Olympics.

The funds, however, are a drop in the bucket when it comes to what’s needed to make needed improvements to the Pasadena venue.

Officials, including (left to right) Rose Bowl Legacy Foundation President Dedan Brozino, Deputy Fire Chief of the City of Pasadena Tim Sell, Congresswoman Laura Friedman, and Rose Bowl Stadium CEO Jens Weiden announced infrastructure funding for the 103-year old Rose Bowl.

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“Over the  next 20 years there's about $200 million that we need to put in and that's everything from updating light fixtures to updating gas, water, wastewater lines, etc.,” said Dedan Brozino,  president of the Rose Bowl Legacy Foundation, the nonprofit that supports the Rose Bowl stadium's preservation and enhancement.

Getting venues ready will be expensive

The money is a much-needed win at a time when elected officials in city, county, state and federal offices have been struggling to find the funds to get L.A.-area venues ready for the global Olympic stage in two years.

The entrance to a men's bathroom at the Rose Bowl.

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A $360 million proposal to spruce up asphalt in parking lots around Exposition Park won’t be done in time for the Olympics, as originally planned. Meanwhile, just up the street, there’s concern that a $2.6 billion expansion of the L.A. Convention Center, which is hosting Olympic wrestling, fencing and judo in 2028 won’t be ready for the Olympics.

Additionally, to save money, LA28 organizers moved Olympic diving to the Rose Bowl complex last year because it has two Olympic-sized pools, while the Exposition Park complex doesn't and would need expensive upgrades.

Topline:

About the chick: The chick hatched March 14. The zoo opened its Cape vulture enclosure in February 2025 after years of planning to encourage the birds to roost and nest, welcoming a new breeding pair that year. When it grows to be an adult, it’ll have a wingspan of 8 1/2 feet.

About the enclosure: The L.A. Zoo said it spent years developing the vulture habitat, which was designed to mimic the vultures’ natural environment in South Africa and nearby countries. Dominick Dorsa II, the zoo’s director of animal care, said in a statement the successful hatching is “a testament to the design and construction” of the habitat.

How to see the chick: You can’t for the time being. Zoo officials are keeping it away from visitors until the chick matures, though you can still see adult Cape vultures at the zoo’s enclosure.

Though visitors will have to wait until the chick matures to see it in the enclosure, you can still take in the impressive eight and a half foot wingspan of the adult Cape vultures.

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What zoo officials are saying: “Welcoming a Cape vulture chick is a thrilling moment for our team and a beacon of hope for African vultures,” the L.A. Zoo’s curator of birds Rose Legato said in a statement. “Vultures are one of nature's most misunderstood marvels, and I cannot wait for our guests to eventually watch this chick grow and learn just how vital they are to our ecosystems.”

About the species: Cape vultures are listed as a vulnerable species due to human activities and encroachment. According to the L.A. Zoo, African vultures are more closely related to eagles and hawks than vultures native to the Americas, like the zoo's California condors that hatched last year.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

What should have been a celebration for formerly incarcerated youth completing a reentry program at the Boyle Heights Arts Conservatory (BHAC) last week instead ended with seven students and two staff members detained by the Los Angeles Police Department, according to witnesses. 

Now, nearly a week later, BHAC staff and city officials are demanding answers from the LAPD, with some accusing officers of racial profiling. 

According to the LAPD, officers observed a large group gathered on the corner of Cesar E. Chavez Avenue and Mott Street around 4:16 p.m. on March 26. Authorities then requested backup for what they described as “a large group surrounding officers,” LAPD Public Information Officer Tony Im said. 

The group, classified by police as an “aggressive gang group,” consisted of seven 18-year-old students from the BHAC’s Bridge Academy Movement (BAM) program and two BHAC staff members.

The BAM program pays formerly incarcerated youth to complete 200-250 hours in media and visual arts training to prepare them for creative careers. That day, students were set to showcase their work at the BAM program graduation for families and community members. 

Rene Weber, a teaching artist at the BHAC, had been with the students setting up for the ceremony minutes before the incident occurred. 

According to Weber, the students had gone to coffee across the street at Milpa Kitchen as they often did, when staff were alerted that they were being detained. 

Weber said he arrived to find students and a staff member pressed against the wall in handcuffs. 

Video from the scene, taken by a staff member at the BHAC, shows multiple officers surrounding the group. At one point, an officer orders a person to “get on the wall” and displays a stun gun.  

“No, none of that, these are kids right here,” the staff member replies.

Another staff member, Teotl Veliz, recorded a large police response.  

“I counted 12 cop cars, that’s at least 25 cops, and they had a helicopter,” Veliz said. “It was just so comedic, tragically comedic, that it was on their graduation day too.”

Officers established a perimeter with yellow tape along the side of Ashley’s Beauty Salon as local business owners and witnesses gathered around the students. 

“I was just incredibly disappointed in LAPD… because it became so apparent to everybody, all at the same time, that it was racial profiling and nothing else,” Veliz said.

Weber said officers gave shifting explanations for the stop at the scene, including blocking the sidewalk and possible underage vaping. After Weber told the officers that all of the students were 18, they said they would investigate whether the group had any gang affiliation. 

Police have not responded to questions about what led officers to believe that the group was gang-affiliated. 

Weber recalled pleading with the officers to let the group go and explaining to them that they worked across the street. Community members and local business owners also stepped in to vouch for the students. 

“Our job is to help them gain a new perspective on life,” Weber said. “They’re coming out of juvenile detention and they’re turning their lives around. We can do our part in keeping them off the streets and keeping them doing better but what does it mean if they’re going to be profiled and treated exactly the same way?” 

In total, seven 18-year-old students and two staff members were detained. BHAC staff said one student and one staff member were taken to Hollenbeck Community Police Station and released less than two hours later after advocacy from community members and Councilmember Ysabel Jurado.

The incident ultimately resulted in an infraction for smoking a cannabis e-vape on a public sidewalk, according to a photo of the infraction shared with the Beat. LAPD did not provide details about the people taken to Hollenbeck Station or the infraction. 

The graduation ceremony was cancelled that night and is expected to be rescheduled in April. 

“Graduation should be a moment of pride and possibility — not fear,” Jurado said in a statement. “I’m seeking answers about what occurred, and this underscores the need for stronger relationships between law enforcement and community organizations so moments like these are protected, not disrupted.”

Carmelita Ramirez‑Sanchez, the conservatory’s executive director, said she was grateful to the community and Jurado for advocating for the students’ release. Jurado met her at Hollenbeck Station within 20 minutes of being alerted to the incident, she said. 

“They had store owners, señoras, barbers, that ran out and were trying to explain to the police who our kids were,” Ramirez‑Sanchez said. 

Still, she said the incident tarnished what should have been a joyous celebration.

“I imagine that what this does is derail this entire idea that you can be an active participant in your own restorative growth,” she said.