About those tiny giant-slayers
What have scientists learned about the beetles killing giant sequoias?
Volume 2, Number 46 - Thursday, May 16
Published every Monday and Thursday
By Nancy Vigran
For Giant Sequoia News
NOW STANDING NEARLY 300 FEET TALL, many Giant Sequoias have survived nature’s wrath — including drought and wildfires — for more than 3,000 years. But within the last decade, around 33 trees are believed to have succumbed to an attack from a tiny creature. Native to western forest ranges of the United States, bark beetles measuring less than a quarter-inch in size are believed to have killed the monarchs.
Bark beetles are notorious for devastating groves of pines and fir in densely forested areas, but until recently, giant sequoias were seemingly immune. This is no longer believed to be true, and changed conditions in the last decade or so are thought to have weakened some giant sequoias so much that beetle attacks killed them.
As reported by the Giant Sequoia Lands Coalition in its 2023 Progress Report, released earlier this year, a team from the Ancient Forest Society launched a giant sequoia seed collection program in Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks and Calaveras Big Trees State Park last year. While climbing giant sequoias, the team observed cone dynamics and bark beetle attacks in 104 giant sequoia trees across 11 groves.
In collaboration with Seth Davis, a forestry researcher at Colorado State University, a new project examining bark beetle attacks was launched. An update on that report is expected next week.
Even before the Ancient Forest Society’s work last year, reports of giant sequoia mortality related to beetle attacks discouraged scientists.
In early January 2020, Christy Brigham, chief of resource management and science at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, shared preliminary results of a joint study by the National Park Service and the U.S. Geological Service. A beetle attack was believed to have killed at least 28 giant sequoias.
“This is a tree that has lived through 2,000 years of fires, other droughts, wet years, dry years, hot years, cold years. It’s been here longer than Europeans have been in this country, and it’s dead. And it shouldn’t be dead,” Brigham said in an article published by The Guardian.
In a recording that accompanied that report, she talked through tears about Lazarus, a giant sequoia within Sequoia National Park that had recently died. She described the still-standing tree as just a skeleton.
“This is not how giant sequoias die. It’s supposed to stand there for another 500 years with all its needles on it, this quirky, persistent, impressive, amazing thing, and then fall over,” Brigham said.
Nate Stephenson, now retired, spent much of his career as a forest ecologist with the USGS at Sequoia National Park. In a recent email, he said he collected data on sequoias attacked by beetles for several years beginning in 2017.
What he observed was that the beetles distinctly attacked larger trees, roughly larger than 3 feet in diameter.
“They seemed to leave small sequoias alone,” he added.
Stephenson told CapRadio in late December 2020 that the beetle is native to the area and that some people believe it’s a type of cedar bark beetle.
Building on earlier research, members of the Giant Sequoia Lands Coalition have continued to work to learn more about the beetle and its deadly impact.
Brigham had just returned from examining trees in the field last week when she responded to an email inquiry and said many questions would be answered at a media event next Tuesday.
During a Town Hall meeting at Calaveras Big Trees State Park last night, Forester Jim Suero said beetles were also found in the giant sequoias there.
Tree climbers from Ancient Forests were at the state park this week, climbing trees and collecting data, he said.
Suero noted that the insect might be the Western Cedar Bark Beetle (Phloeosinus punctatus) but that the lead entomologist working with the federal groves believes it may be a separate species yet to be named.
• Freelance journalist Nancy Vigran lives in Northern California. Editor Claudia Elliott contributed to this report.
Government responds to lawsuit over Castle and Windy fire restoration projects
As previously reported, in February, the Sierra Club, Earth Island Institute and Sequoia ForestKeeper sued the Forest Service over what they called “two large logging and vegetation management projects in the Giant Sequoia National Monument and Sequoia National Forest.”
The Forest Service calls its plans the Castle Fire Ecological Restoration Project and the Windy Fire Restoration Project. I wrote about the plans HERE.
The government responded on Monday with a filing in United States District Court, Eastern District of California, Fresno Division. You can download the PDF of the government’s response below. Although the case was first filed in the Northern District of California, it was moved to Fresno last month, as I reported HERE.
Todd Kim, assistant attorney general in the environment and natural resources division of the United States Justice Department, submitted the government’s answer to the complaint. Senior Attorney John P. Tustin and Trial Attorney Lawrence Pittman will represent the Forest Service.
The lawsuit alleges that the Forest Service violated provisions of the National Environmental Policy Act and Administrative Procedure Act when Forest Supervisor Teresa Benson (now retired) signed the decision notices for the projects in late December.
If you read last week’s newsletter HERE, you may remember that I said a little understanding of NEPA is essential for understanding issues related to the Forest Service’s giant sequoia management. If you missed that newsletter and don’t know the difference between a CE, an EA, and an EIS, here’s a cool little graphic I found at healthyforests.org that may help.
The 2020 Castle and 2021 Windy fires were among six fires in six years — between 2015 and 2021 —b lamed for burning more than 85% of all native giant sequoia grove acreage. When Sequoia National Forest prepared the two restoration projects, the agency decided to prepare EAs — environmental assessments — for each project.
The complaint challenging the Forest Service’s approval of the projects alleges that “the types of major federal actions proposed … require detailed analyses in Environmental Impact Statements to pass legal muster and comply with the National Environmental Policy Act. Instead, the Forest Service only prepared two Environmental Assessments and associated Findings of No Significant Impact.”
In its answer, the government “denies that the Castle Fire Ecological Restoration Project and the Windy Fire Restoration Project are arbitrary or capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law,” and states that the decision notices complied with all applicable laws and regulations.
So, what happens next?
As a NEPA lawsuit, the government states in its answer, “the court’s task is not to find facts, but to review the administrative record that was before the federal agency at the time it made the challenged decision to determine whether, as a matter of law, the record supports the agency’s decision or whether the agency’s decision is arbitrary, capricious or otherwise contrary to law.”
In other words, the court will look at what the Forest Service reviewed to make its decision and determine whether it acted in accordance with the law.
You can get an idea of what will be reviewed by checking out the Castle Fire project page HERE and the Windy Fire project page HERE.
You’ll see dozens of documents, including comments made during the process by representatives of the organizations that have sued, and that Forest Service staff met with them to discuss the issues.
“We and the objectors did not come to a resolution of their concerns during the meeting,” Forest Supervisor Benson wrote in the Castle Fire project decision (and something similar in the Windy Fire project decision).
What will happen next?
According to the government’s filing, court rules call for production of the administrative record (essentially, all of those documents) within 45 days and a briefing on the merits of the plaintiff’s challenge to the agency’s actions.
In the meantime, it appears the Forest Service can proceed with the planned work, and at some future date a judge will decide on the case. — Claudia Elliott
Coming soon …
We’re finally getting nice weather, roads are opening and there’s a lot happening in the giant sequoia world. Watch for articles soon about Tulare County’s Balch Park and its neighbor, Mountain Home Demonstration State Forest reopening to visitors sometime next month, the media event about beetles that Nancy Vigran mentioned in her article above, last night’s Town Hall meeting at Calaveras Big Trees State Park and a few other special features coming up next week and the week after. — Claudia Elliott
Wildfire, water & weather update
A “rapid cooldown over the weekend” in the Sierra Nevada was predicted in a Washington Post article published Monday (and there may be some precipitation).
In the story, UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain commented on what a combination of factors means for California’s fire season this year:
“I do think there is a tilt in the odds toward a fire season that will be unusually mild to start in California and near or above average severity in its final month or two. We’re due for a pretty substantial upsurge in wildfire activity if and when things do dry out and warm up, and I think there’s a good chance that precisely that will happen later this year, starting probably in August or September.”
You can read the article HERE (gift link).
The best Sierra Nevada weather forecasts are at NWS Hanford, HERE, and NWS Sacramento, HERE.
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Thanks for reading!
I wish to make one point regarding the article "About those tiny giant-slayers", which states, "Bark beetles are notorious for devastating groves of pines and fir in densely forested areas, but until recently, giant sequoias were seemingly immune. This is no longer believed to be true, and changed conditions in the last decade. "
A distinct species of bark beetle may have evolved due to changing conditions, but I believe the article would have been stronger had it discussed the fact that the agencies have been complicit in contributing to changing giant sequoia grove conditions by opening the canopy in those groves with via continuous vegetation management manipulations.
I read that climate change is causing more bark beetle infestations… no big surprise there. Just thinking that between the problems the various gov’t agencies have in doing ANYTHING in the sequoias ( thanks to complex agency actions… that chart you included says it all!…and piled up lawsuits from various action groups .. more like INaction…we would all do better working on our carbon footprints than trying to get anything done for the sequoias….sadly. The big picture of man’s worldwide destructiveness hamstrings everything. It looks like we must first save the planet if we want to save the sequoias! No small feat, and definitely much harder to accomplish.