Once thought to be basically immortal, sequoias are now dying in droves

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://wildfiretoday.com/2022/07/15/once-thought-to-be-basically-immortal-sequoias-are-now-dying-in-droves/

Kyle Dickman has written a must-read article for Outside magazine about how the largest trees on Earth which can live for more than 3,000 years, are being increasingly affected in recent years by fire. It was published this week at the magazine and covers how management of the giant sequoias in Yosemite National Park and other areas in the Sierras has affected the vulnerability of the huge mature specimens in the groves.

Mr. Dickman is a former member of the Tahoe Interagency Hotshot Crew and spent five seasons fighting fires. He wrote the book “On the Burning Edge: A fateful Fire and the Men Who Fought It“, which is about the Granite Mountain Hotshots and the fire where all but one of them died in 2013, the Yarnell Hill Fire.

The article frequently mentions Mr. Dickman’s brother, Garrett, who is the Forest Ecologist at Yosemite and has been heavily involved in managing and attempting to save the giant sequoias. The piece is extremely well written. You can read the entire article at Outside.

Below are a few excerpts:

“What nature’s doing isn’t natural,” [said Joe Suarez, the Arrowhead Hotshots superintendent]

Garrett [Dickman] and Christy Brigham, the director of science at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park, are standing in front of an outhouse that firefighters saved from the Castle Fire, sitting in the patchy shade of a 2,000-year-old dead tree that they did not. Firefighters protect life and property before all else—even holes to shit in, so long as they have walls around them. Listening to the two compare notes on their jobs makes clear that the fate of giant sequoias is almost entirely in the hands of a few middle managers, working at a few select parks, who navigate arcane environmental laws and a financing system cobbled together with public grants. If sequoia death is a product of American gridlock, sequoia survival will happen because of the tenacity of a few individuals.

*snip*

[hatrack]

1. See them while you can, I guess . . . .

.

[hatrack]

2. Bristlecone Pines, also ancient trees, are dying by the 1,000s in the mountains above Death Valley

The trees had stood for more than 1,000 years. Their sturdy roots clung to the crumbling mountainside. Their gnarled limbs reached toward the desert sky. The rings of their trunks told the story of everything they’d witnessed — every attack they’d rebuffed, every crisis they’d endured. Weather patterns shifted; empires rose and fell; other species emerged, mated, migrated, died. But here, in one of the harshest environments on the planet, the bristlecone pines survived. It seemed they always would.

Until the day in 2018 when Constance Millar ascended the trail to Telescope Peak — the highest point in Death Valley National Park — and discovered hundreds of dead and dying bristlecones extending as far as she could see. The trees’ needles glowed a flaming orange; their bark was a ghostly gray. Millar estimated that the damage encompassed 60 to 70 percent of the bristlecones on Telescope Peak. “It’s like coming across a murder scene,” said Millar, an emerita research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service who has studied bristlecone pines for the better part of 40 years.

In a study published this spring, she and fellow researchers showed that the West’s worst drought in at least 1,200 years had critically weakened the trees. Voracious bark beetles — a threat to which bristlecones were previously thought immune — delivered the death blow.

After outlasting millennia of disruptions and disaster, human-caused climate change is proving too much for the ancient trees to bear. Rising temperatures have caused an explosion in the populations of insects that threaten the trees and undermined their capacity to defend themselves, scientists say. Although Great Basin bristlecone pines are not considered at risk of extinction, cherished specimens and distinctive populations are struggling to survive.

EDIT

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/07/14/these-trees-have-survived-1000-years-can-they-survive-climate-change/

[FakeNoose]

3. Maybe groves of sequoia can be started in places that aren't so rainfall-challenged?

Pennsylvania or upstate New York get a lot more rain than some areas of California. Or perhaps the mountains of West Virginia, Kentucky and western Virginia? Unless they try it, they will never know whether it's possible.

[NickB79]

7. Michigan

https://www.wzzm13.com/article/news/local/michigan-life/attack-of-the-clones-michigan-lab-clones-ancient-trees-used-to-reverse-climate-change/69-93cadf18-b27d-4a13-a8bb-a6198fb8404b

I have a few young trees (not clones from these trees though) I'm trialing in southern Minnesota.

[SCantiGOP]

4. "Parking Lot" by Joni Mitchell:

They took all the trees
And put ‘em in a tree museum.
And they charged all the people an arm and a leg just to see ‘em.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

13. If you're going to quote the lyrics, please quote them correctly.

They took all the trees
Put 'em in a tree museum
And they charged the people
A dollar and a half just to see 'em

[SCantiGOP]

19. No big deal, but

I googled it cause I wasn’t sure of the correct lyrics, and cut and pasted that from the site that came up.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

21. I'm old enough to remember when that song came out.

That helps.

[Chainfire]

5. We just can't have nothin!

[Duppers]

6. K & R x 1000

[Lancero]

8. Canary in the coalmine. Maybe our species will pay attention to this one...

...But I don't have much hope considering the long line of dead canaries our species has left in its wake.

[Rebl2]

10. No they won't

[misanthrope]

16. That's the evidence-based conclusion**nm

**

[SalviaBlue]

9. Fuck

[uponit7771]

22. +1,

[KPN]

11. We humans sometimes really mess up badly. Imagine ...we are at least partly

if not mostly responsible for the extirpation of 3000+year old lives. And we individually exist here only for 80 or so years if we are lucky.

[Botany]

12. A little knowledge

Both the Sequoia and much more the coastal redwoods have flat needles that gather water from
the clouds/fogs that for 1000s of years have been part of the environment but with climate change
those clouds and fogs are not as common and the trees don't get the moisture the need to
thrive. Once a tree is no longer thriving then it is open to more disease, insect attacks and fire
damage and those trees have thousands of years of evolution as to having fire as part of their ecology
but not under the water stress conditions that are happening now.

[electric_blue68]

18. Oh, knew about the fire part but not the clouds/fog part.

If they'd only listened to us back in the '80's marching, and protesting for Renewables back then!

We could have avoided So much!

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

14. Everything that lives eventually dies.

It's sad, but it's the cycle of life.

I've been reading stuff about earlier mass extinctions on this planet. There have been times when 90% of all species died out. In earlier epochs life was VERY different, and it was the mass extinctions that allowed this planet to get to the conditions that eventually resulted in us. And yeah, while we are doing a lot of stupid damage, the current extinctions aren't even remotely close to the mass extinctions of earlier times.

One book to read is A Natural History of the Future by Rob Dunn. I know I've read at least one other, but can't recall the title or author at present. Sorry. However, if you Google "Mass Extinctions" you will find several books that look interesting.

[GB_RN]

15. Sequoias Actually Need These Fires...

The cones won't open without the heat. The seedlings need the fires to have cleared out undergrowth and opened holes in the canopy so they can get sunlight, and the fires return nutrients to the soil.

"Forestry management" has actually done these trees and other forests a huge disservice. All it is doing is trying to protect the tourism value of the forest, as-is, but jeopardizes the sequoias' survival long-term because there are few to no seedlings. Basically, the forest isn't in a natural state.

[hatrack]

17. "These fires" are not what the trees need . . . .

"These fires" are tinder-dry, overgrown forests exploding in flames and creating their own weather as a result of global warming.

"These fires" produce updrafts so intense that pilots of spotter and tanker planes trying to deal with the fire front approaching Mariposa Grove report tree branches falling from above around their aircraft.

The fire at Yosemite National Park started on July 7th, near the Washburn Trail in the National Park Mariposa Grove area. As of today, the Washburn Fires has burned nearly 4,000 acres. Firefighters are working around the clock to contain the fire and preserve the over 500 sequoias- including the 3,000-year-old Grizzly Giant. A special “ground-based” sprinkler system was installed to increase the humidity around the sequoias to protect them. While the park crew is working to save trees from the ground up, firefighters are tackling the fires from above. Pilots have confirmed dangerous flying tree branches from the fire
Here’s what we know-

Twitter user @Rob_on_sisukas posted some of the radio chatter overheard from firefighting crews on Saturday. In it, one firefighting pilot reports that his plane was almost hit by a tree branch that fell from above the plane. This confirmed that the intense wildfire is also sending debris into the skies. In the audio you can hear the pilot sharing that “a branch went right over the top…probably 50 feet above [them], coming down and falling” right in between another plane and his. The pilot says, “If we keep seeing that, we might have to knock it off. I don’t want to take the chance of busting a window on an airplane or hurting an aircraft for this.”

EDIT

https://www.yahoo.com/video/pilots-witness-tree-branches-flying-171917833.html

You've nailed what the sequoia forests need - clearing of undergrowth - and that's exactly what's been done around the Mariposa Grove in the past few years, which is one thing that helped protect the surrounding sequoia groves. The other, of course, is maximum fire crew efforts to protect a famous NPS holding.

EDIT

Prescribed burns — most recently conducted in the grove in 2018 — mimic low intensity that help sequoias by clearing out downed branches, flammable needles and smaller trees that could compete with them for light and water. The heat from fires also helps cones open up to spread their seeds.

While intentional burns have been conducted in sequoias since the 1960s, they are increasingly being seen as a necessity to the save the massive trees. Once thought to be almost fireproof, up to 20% of all giant sequoias — native only in the Sierra Nevada range — have been killed in the past five years during intense wildfires.

EDIT

https://www.joplinglobe.com/sports/preventive-fires-credited-with-saving-yosemite-sequoias/article_1ecb6393-c57c-51fb-9d8a-91e7600b629c.html

Low-intensity seasonal fires could and should protect California's remaining forests. Whether they can be staged safely in the future looks increasingly unlikely.

[HuskyOffset]

20. Dammit, reality is moving closer to Silent Running

We are moving closer & closer to Silent Running all the time. Very depressing.