Assisted migration
Should we help giant sequoias move elsewhere?
Volume 2, Number 23 - Thursday, Oct. 26, 2023
Published twice a week, on Monday and Thursday
Perspective
ASSISTED MIGRATION of a species has been a controversial topic among scientists and others.
The New York Times Magazine explores the topic in an article published yesterday with the compelling headline: “Can We Save the Redwoods by Helping Them Move?” and a subhead: “The largest trees on the planet can’t easily ‘migrate’ — but in a warming world, some humans are helping them try to find new homes.”
You can read the entire article HERE (gift link), and I have a few excerpts below.
Readers of this newsletter likely understand that giant sequoias and coastal redwoods are different trees. Along with the dawn redwood, a deciduous tree native to China, they are all part of the subfamily of coniferous trees known as Sequoioideae.
The NY Times Magazine article discusses both California redwoods and efforts to save them by planting large numbers of trees in other areas. It focuses on Philip Stielstra, a Boeing retiree in Seattle, who has worked to plant and encourage the planting of coastal redwood in Washington state.
Stielstra’s efforts resulted in his meeting David Milarch, co-founder of Archangel Ancient Tree Archive in Michigan. I’ve previously reported on Archangel’s efforts. The organization has collected giant sequoia seed in the Sierra Nevada and also creates “living archives” of trees in Michigan and elsewhere.
Milarch, according to the NY Times Magazine article, “thought that as the world warmed, the unique conditions in which they thrived — well-drained soil that’s neither too hot nor too cold and that is also fed by water from snow melting upslope — would disappear, eventually leading to the trees’ extinction.”
An excerpt:
This problem — a species under increasing threat in the place it has long inhabited — isn’t limited to giant sequoias. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, more than 12,000 species are in similar situations. The question is what, if anything, can be done to prevent a raft of extinctions driven by our remaking of the earth’s climate.
And another:
Assisted migration hinges on a deceptively simple-seeming notion: that we can, and should, help solve a problem of our own making; that we should save at-risk plants and animals by moving them to safer places. The concept was first floated in the 1980s, when some conservationists foresaw that as climate shifted, certain species protected by wildlife preserves might not be able to survive over the long-term within their boundaries. Yet the practice didn’t really become a topic of scientific debate until two decades later, when a group of self-described citizen scientists decided, like Stielstra and Milarch, to do something to prevent a tree from disappearing from its current range.
Reporter Moises Velasquez-Manoff discusses the natural history of California’s redwoods and shares what various experts told him, including:
For giant sequoia, the picture is slightly grimmer, if far from hopeless. Historically the trees were less often logged than the coast redwood; their brittle wood tended to shatter when felled, reducing its commercial appeal. About 70 percent of the original old-growth sequoia groves are thought to remain. But in the past decade or so, one disaster after another has befallen them. In the 2010s, the most intense droughts on record caused a loss of foliage. Then came the wildfires. The tree is exquisitely adapted to fire: In fact, it needs fire to complete its reproductive cycle; green cones can stay on higher branches for decades, until fire dries them and coaxes them to open. But the intensity of recent wildfires along the southern Sierra overwhelmed many old sequoias. Nathan Stephenson, a forest ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey who has studied the trees for decades and who lives about 30 miles away from one grove that caught fire, recalls burned sequoia needles raining down on his deck in 2020. That’s when he understood that, for the first time in his experience, the fire had reached the trees’ crowns. Between 13 and 19 percent of the world’s sequoias were lost in recent fires. “They’ve been there thousands of years,” Stephenson says, “and they just sort of burned up in the blink of an eye.”
I WISH THE REPORTER would have talked to Jim Hamerly. More than 1,200 miles south of Seattle — and outside the natural range of the Big Trees, Hamerly grows giant sequoias on Mount Palomar in San Diego County. You may have read his report on those trees and others growing on national forests in Southern California HERE.
As I’ve previously reported, the concept of assisted migration is discussed in this VIDEO by Bill Libby, Professor Emeritus of Forest Genetics at the University of California Berkeley. Libby is highly regarded for his work with giant sequoias and other trees.
At the 2016 Coast Redwood Science Symposium, Libby noted that redwoods — coast redwood and giant sequoias — have been on Earth for over 100 million years.
“They’ve been all over the place in both hemispheres,” he said. “And during that time, they’ve had to migrate sometimes long distances. And probably in response to some need to migrate, they’ve done so successfully over that 100 million plus years until they’ve landed where they are now — in these fairly restricted ranges pretty much all within California.”
As Velasquez-Manoff noted in the NY Times Magazine article, critics of assisted migration argue that “nature” should be left to produce its own adaptations.
Another excerpt:
Among land managers, the reactions to efforts like Stielstra’s run from exasperation to carefully qualified endorsement. “I don’t think private people moving sequoias to Washington is a bad thing,” Christy Brigham, the chief of resource management and science at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, told me. But she and others argue that conservation efforts should focus on better management of the land where they already grow. “We need to not give up on sequoias where they are now,” she says.
Wildfire, water & weather update
Even with modern technology, there is a bit of mystery and excitement that comes with each new season. We’re well into fall now, and yesterday, the Central Sierra Snow Laboratory, located at Donner Pass, reported the first measurable snow of the season. You can check it out HERE. Warmer temperatures are expected early next week. The best Sierra Nevada weather forecasts are at NWS Hanford, HERE, and NWS Sacramento, HERE.
Wildfire update: As weather and other conditions allow, prescribed burning continues at many locations in the Sierra Nevada. No large wildfires are burning in Central California. Sequoia National Forest issued its final report on the Rabbit Fire yesterday, noting that the fire originated on Sept. 30 from a lightning strike in Hume Lake Ranger District. From the report: “It originally grew to 48 acres and continued to burn with low intensity, creeping through, consuming the dead and downed trees and brush that covered the forest floor and fire perimeter. Firefighters took advantage of weather conditions to grow the acreage of the fire to 2,865 acres through firing operations.” You can see the location of prescribed burns and a few small fires on WatchDuty HERE.
The future of this newsletter
I appreciate the response I’ve had from a number of readers about the future of this newsletter and my Giant Sequoia News efforts since writing about this last week. If you missed that, you can read it HERE. If there is sufficient support, I would like to reshape this effort into a nonprofit news organization.
As I noted, there was a time when newspapers up and down the state had reporters who did a fine job covering giant sequoia and related Sierra Nevada issues. Those days are gone forever.
With more support, I think Giant Sequoia News could grow to fill the resultant void.
If you have ideas, please reach out.
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Giant sequoias in the news
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Thanks for reading!
I was wondering if you had any info on the giant sequoias planted along Oregon highways, such as in Milwaukie and in the Willamette Valley. I thought some were planted as memorials to service members killed in World War II or something like that. What is known? Any info you or your readers have would be much appreciated.