Volume 2, Number 66 - Thursday, July 25, 2024
Published every Monday and Thursday
Perspective
ON MONDAY, I shared my article about Del Pengilly, a district ranger on Sequoia National Forest when I began covering giant sequoias around 2000 and perhaps the first Forest Service employee I ever met. If you missed that piece, you can read it HERE.
Below, you’ll find an update on an area of SQF that drew international attention during the early 1990s, the part of the Black Mountain Grove that includes a small group of giant sequoias known as the “Three Sisters.”
Pengilly took me to see the area sometime in the early 2000s, and even then, the land around the trees looked nothing like the shocking photo that the Sierra Club sometimes displayed at meetings of the Scientific Advisory Panel for the first Giant Sequoia National Monument management plan. That photo showed the trees standing along on a denuded hillside following logging of the approximately 15-acre slope.
When I visited the area more than 20 years ago, there were plenty of young giant sequoias growing around the older giants. The young trees hadn’t filled in as much as they had by the time photos from 2010 and 2014 were taken, but they were taller than me. (See Monday’s newsletter HERE for photos).
I wondered about the trees through the years, especially after the wildfires that have ravaged giant sequoia lands. In May, I wrote a little about my visit to this area HERE, and below you can read my update on the fate of the trees.
So much has happened since 1987 and it seems to me that the Sierra Club’s lawsuit over the logging that included the area around the “Three Sisters” was the beginning of a series of events that impacted giant sequoias in the Southern Sierra — for better or for worse, depending on your perspective.
I’m hoping to interview others who have first-hand knowledge in coming weeks and months.
‘Three Sisters’ story attracted international attention — and the famous trees survived a wildfire that killed 52 of 183 mature giant sequoias in the Black Mountain Grove
By Claudia Elliott
Giant Sequoia News
THEY’RE NOT the largest giant sequoias, nor are they the oldest. But three giant sequoias growing in a remote area of the Black Mountain Grove of Giant Sequoia National Monument in the mountains east of Porterville, California, are among the most famous.
The “Three Sisters,” as these trees are called, were the topic of newspaper and magazine articles that reached readers around the world as environmental organizations, including the Sierra Club, drew attention to logging on Sequoia National Forest that they believed threatened the future of the Big Trees.
Photos of the aftermath of a 1987 logging project on a 15-acre slope in the Black Mountain Grove — temporarily leaving the three large giant sequoias standing in the middle of a clear-cut — were featured in articles published in Audubon and National Geographic magazines and many newspapers in the early 1990s.
The Forest Service does not refer to the trees by name in a fact sheet published about the Black Mountain Grove (HERE), but it does refer to the controversy.
According to the fact sheet, the timber-cutting in the area in the late 1980s was done “to help promote the establishment of young giant sequoia seedlings, to reduce the chances for devastating wildfire, and to contribute to the supply of wood products needed by the nation.”
Although the fact sheet is dated 2020, it does not mention the Pier Fire that hit the Black Mountain Grove in 2017 and the fact sheet may have been written before that fire.
A news release from SQF in November 2020 described the impact of the 2017 Pier Fire, one of two wildfires that year that resulted in significant losses of mature giant sequoia trees (the other was the Railroad Fire that burned through the Nelder Grove on Sierra National Forest).
“In both places,” the agency said, “there were significant losses of mature giant sequoia trees. The Save the Redwoods League and the U.S. Forest Service Ecology Program teamed up to monitor giant sequoia losses. They found that in the Nelder Grove, 39 out of the 104 mature sequoias died. In the areas burned at higher severity sampled in the Black Mountain Grove, 52 of the 183 mature sequoias surveyed died. These events raised awareness that even the oldest, largest giant sequoias are vulnerable to high-severity fire.”
THE BLACK MOUNTAIN GROVE is no stranger to logging — or wildfire.
According to the Forest Service fact sheet, some of the earliest timber cutting in giant sequoia groves by the Forest Service took place there around 1970.
“The cutting was designed to improve health and vigor of the grove,” the fact sheet states. “It was done on a small scale with little fanfare. In 1985 similar cutting on a larger scale helped create a national controversy on the subject of giant sequoia grove management by the Forest Service.”
According to a report of a study by Forest Service scientists Marc D. Meyer and Hugh D. Safford published in Fire Ecology in August 2011, nearly half of the grove burned in an unnamed wildfire in 1928, and additional areas burned in the 2008 Solo II Fire in a separate area of the grove.
Their study also mentioned the controversial timber harvests of the late 1980s.
The authors noted that their study results had several implications for the management and restoration of giant sequoia groves.
“First, use of wildland fire (i. e., wildfire or prescribed fire) to enhance giant sequoia recruitment must be of sufficient intensity and resultant severity to create canopy gaps, increase understory light, and remove surface litter. Low-severity fire, while beneficial for other reasons (e.g., surface and ladder fuel reduction, nutrient cycling), may not adequately facilitate natural giant sequoia regeneration or canopy gap creation.
“Second, intensive retention harvest (e.g., shelterwood and seed tree harvest, clearcutting) followed by burning and possibly giant sequoia planting as observed in this study does increase giant sequoia regeneration. However, these benefits likely vary with the size and frequency of created canopy gaps, density of vegetation surrounding the gaps, and availability of solar radiation and soil moisture within gaps. Additionally, the benefits of intensive retention harvest or high-severity fire for giant sequoia regeneration are offset by potential negative impacts to resting and nesting habitat for late-seral dependent wildlife species in the southern Sierra Nevada, such as the Pacific fisher and California spotted owl.”
The creation of Giant Sequoia National Monument in 2000 ended timber sales in giant sequoia groves, including the Black Mountain Grove. The proclamation by President William Clinton states: “Removal of trees, except for personal use fuel wood, from within the monument area may take place only if clearly needed for ecological restoration and maintenance or public safety.”
Timber harvests such as the one around the “Three Sisters” and others approved by district rangers in the late 1980s are no longer an option for the Forest Service.
But Meyer and Safford, in their 2011 study report, said that some of the benefits of intensive retention harvest could be accomplished “via prudent combinations of wildland fire, strategic forest thinning, and prescribed fire.
“This and other adaptive and integrated strategies will be critical for the management of sequoia groves in an era of amplified wildfire activity, increasing fire severity and rapidly changing climate,” they wrote.
OF THE MANY WILDFIRES that have burned or threatened giant sequoia lands since 2017, only the Pier Fire and the Windy Fire burned in the Black Mountain Grove.
Gretchen Fitzgerald, ecosystem staff officer for SQF, said in an email on July 2 that a very small portion of the Windy Fire burned in Black Mountain Grove.
“The area that burned thinned out some smaller trees (not sequoia) and overall it looks great,” she said, but the Windy Fire did not burn in the areas of the “Three Sisters.”
The “Three Sisters” also were not burned in the 2017 Pier Fire, although nearby areas were burned.
“In the portion of the (Black Mountain) grove that burned in the Pier Fire, regeneration is abundant,” Fitzgerald added. “We did some piling of the dead trees and burned some of those this winter. There were a few piles close to young sequoia and the sequoia got scorched and probably killed a few (though I haven’t been up there to confirm that). The regeneration is so prolific, that we don’t feel like it jeopardizes the ability of the grove to regrow.
“When sequoia do regenerate, they start off with thousands of trees, which thin out rapidly. We plan to do some regeneration surveys out there in the high severity burned areas of the Pier Fire and will get a good estimate of trees per acre by species that are regenerating,” she added.
Marianne Emmendorfer, forest silviculturist and giant sequoia specialist for SQF, said that backfiring during the Pier Fire may have killed some small trees growing near the “Three Sisters.” Firefighters sometimes do backfiring to create a line around areas they want to keep fire out of, even as they’re fighting the fire.
“I’m assuming that backfiring did kill some smaller trees, but it was probably a good thing generally as it thinned out the stand and created the bare mineral soil sequoias need for successful regeneration,” she said in a July 2 email.
“Any backfiring wasn’t so intense that it killed large areas of small trees,” Emmendorfer added, “since the sequoia plantation immediately above the ‘Three Sisters’ looks great, and there’s a lot of sequoia and other tree saplings that survived the Pier Fire, and seedlings that have come in after the fire around the ‘Three Sisters.’”
On July 21, 2022, the Black Mountain Grove fuels reduction project was included with other projects in the Giant Sequoia Emergency Response approved by Forest Service Chief Randy Moore.
The Forest Service has done extensive work in the Black Mountain Grove since then and huge logs from dead trees are piled along the roads.
The story of the “Three Sisters” will be continued as the trees will undoubtedly face future fire events.
More about Chad Hanson’s views …
On July 18, this newsletter HERE, shared information about a news release from the Giant Sequoia Lands Coalition* that drew attention to two recent studies concerned with giant sequoia regeneration. In that edition, I noted that Chad Hanson of the John Muir Project was “dismissive” of the studies. Hanson asked to clarify his position, and you can read his submission below.
He wrote me earlier this week:
I was hoping that you might follow up after our email exchange so I could let you know where I am critical of the Stephenson et al. (2024) and Soderberg et al. (2024) studies, and where I am not. "Dismissive" does not really capture my position on these studies.
*In Monday’s edition, I erroneously reported that the news release was from Save the Redwoods League. I’ve corrected that on the website version. — Claudia Elliott
It's all about the data
By Chad Hanson, Ph.D.
In the July 18 issue of Giant Sequoia News, there was some discussion of two U.S. government studies on giant sequoia regeneration after recent fires — Stephenson and others (2024) and Soderberg and others (2024) — and a brief mention of my seemingly contrary research. In the July 18 Giant Sequoia News article, Ms. Elliott thoughtfully posed the following question:
"Like many of my readers, I’m just an ordinary person — not a lawyer, scientist, forester or governmental decision-maker. What are we ordinary people to make of these dueling documents — scientists who disagree and environmental organizations challenging the government in court?"
Well said. The good news is that, in the case of the Stephenson and Soderberg studies, the answer to the apparent conflict is not complicated. I have read both of these studies carefully, and multiple times. The studies present fairly straightforward results regarding post-fire giant sequoia regeneration, which is highly variable but also quite widespread and consistent in wildfires. I could make some relatively minor criticisms of certain methods in the two studies, but the bottom line is that I think both studies are pretty good in terms of their methods and results — none of which are particularly remarkable.
I really have a single concern — the same one for both studies — and it has nothing whatsoever to do with their methods or results. Both the Stephenson and Soderberg studies include comments suggesting that in some locations, the density of post-fire sequoia regeneration is too low and that this could lead to a "loss of giant sequoia grove area" in such locations. That's a pretty dramatic claim and suggestion — one that is being used as the basis for recent huge tree cutting and tree planting projects in designated wilderness areas. The problem is that neither of these two studies even investigated whether there is some sequoia seedling density threshold below which all of the sequoia seedlings will supposedly die, causing that area to be "lost" as part of the sequoia grove.
In other words, whether a given area has 10,000 sequoia seedlings per acre or 10 per acre (most areas have thousands per acre), the Stephenson and Soderberg studies did not provide a shred of evidence that a single sequoia grove acre will be “lost.” They made up the entire idea out of thin air. Nor did the authors genuinely consider the possibility that new sequoia seedlings will germinate in the third, or fourth, years post-fire (which, by the way, is not uncommon, and I have observed this in multiple sequoia groves recently within high-intensity fire patches), leading to an increase, not a decrease, in sequoia density relative to just one or two years post-fire.
In scientific studies, it is considered to be unethical to draw conclusions that have no support in your data — especially when those unfounded conclusions are used as the foundation for a political narrative and a radical new forest management program. I raised this concern with the authors of both studies months before they were published but, instead of a professional response, my concerns as a scientist were met with open hostility. Guess I hit a nerve.
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Thanks for reading!
Thank you for sharing the Chad Hanson critique of the two studies that had been referenced in an earlier article that you had published