{"id":605308,"date":"2023-02-06T17:49:40","date_gmt":"2023-02-06T23:49:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.sellorbuyhomefast.com\/index.php\/2023\/02\/06\/the-last-thread-of-hope-to-revive-californias-trees-is-vanishing\/"},"modified":"2023-02-06T17:49:40","modified_gmt":"2023-02-06T23:49:40","slug":"the-last-thread-of-hope-to-revive-californias-trees-is-vanishing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2023\/02\/06\/the-last-thread-of-hope-to-revive-californias-trees-is-vanishing\/","title":{"rendered":"The last thread of hope to revive California\u2019s trees is vanishing"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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This article was originally featured on\u00a0High Country News<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Ecosystems aren\u2019t landscape paintings so much as mosaics, with different pieces that grow and change over time. In healthy forests, patches of recent disturbance, such as fire or logging, sit alongside patches of grasses and shrubs, fast-growing trees and centuries-old mature forests. But these ecological patterns require a climate stability that no longer exists.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Due to human-caused climate change, California\u2019s forest mosaics are vanishing. According to\u00a0a study published in\u00a0AGU Advances<\/em>\u00a0last July<\/a>, the state\u2019s forests lost almost 7 percent, or just over 1,700 square miles, of tree cover since 1985. That\u2019s an area larger than Yosemite National Park. In particular, forests in California\u2019s southwestern mountains lost 14 percent of tree cover.<\/p>\n

Jon Wang, the study\u2019s lead author and an Earth systems scientist at the University of Utah, said that at the current rate, \u201cin a hundred years, we will have lost almost 20 percent of our forests. That\u2019s like all of Southern California\u2019s forests being gone, or all of the Southern Sierras being gone.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Thousand-year-old forests now get only a decade or less between fires to recover. California\u2019s forests are \u201cnever going to get a chance to become old-growth forest again,\u201d Wang said. Instead, they may have \u201cmore of a permanent stunted state.\u201d And aridification means that forests once considered fairly fire-resistant, such as old-growth coastal redwoods, can no longer rely on wet weather conditions for fire protection.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The dramatic loss of many of California\u2019s giant sequoias, ancient trees that lived with fire for thousands of years, particularly troubles Wang\u2019s co-author James T. Randerson, an Earth systems scientist at the University of California, Irvine.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can extrapolate out what\u2019s going to happen to the forest,\u201d Randerson said. \u201cIt\u2019s horrific.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u201cYou can extrapolate out what\u2019s going to happen to the forest. It\u2019s horrific.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

To track how California\u2019s forests changed over the past few decades, researchers used machine learning, training an algorithm to identify vegetation types in satellite images taken every few days, dating back to 1985. The algorithm differentiated between three causes of tree death: wildfires, logging and drought. As it turns out, far more of California\u2019s tree cover is disappearing due to wildfires than from drought or logging.<\/p>\n

The sheer amount of data that this study provides is important, said Philip Higuera, a fire ecologist at the University of Montana, who was not involved with the research. \u201cThe ability to quantify changes, not only from fire, but from forest die-back, and from timber extraction \u2014 to be able to do all of those three at once \u2014 is really valuable, because it helps place them in context\u201d throughout California, Higuera said.<\/p>\n

To be clear, wildfires remain a natural part of healthy forest ecosystems across the West, and controlled burns are important tools in forest management. But California has a fire deficit. Colonizers stamped out Indigenous fire-management practices, so fuels keep building up, leading to ever more destructive conflagrations. Today, the astronomical costs of living in California\u2019s cities encourage\u00a0\u00a0people to move into forests, and fires follow. And those fires, combined with drought, are quickly changing California\u2019s ecosystems.\u00a0<\/p>\n

With effective fire management, some Northern California forests might eventually grow back. But in the southern mountains, where forests are dying even without fires because of drought stress, chaparral may replace trees permanently.\u00a0<\/p>\n

One limitation of this study is its timescale. \u201cThirty-five years is a long study from the perspective of using satellite data, but in the context of forest development and ecosystem change, it can still be relatively short,\u201d Higuera said. Wang and Randerson also cautioned that this research doesn\u2019t model future fire recovery, so more work needs to be done before drawing conclusions about whether these ecosystem changes are permanent.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, California is\u00a0proposing an ambitious plan<\/a>\u00a0to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2045. Right now, Wang said, the carbon offset market is really focused on growing trees. But his data suggests that California may have to lower its expectations. \u201cWe might be moving to a paradigm of saving what\u2019s there,\u201d he said.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

Read More<\/a>
\n Maya L. Kapoor \/ High Country News<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This article was originally featured on\u00a0High Country News. Ecosystems aren\u2019t landscape paintings so much as mosaics, with different pieces that grow and change over time. In healthy forests, patches of recent disturbance, such as fire or logging, sit alongside patches of grasses and shrubs, fast-growing trees and centuries-old mature forests. But these ecological patterns require<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":605309,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27135,536,38983],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-605308","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-revive","8":"category-science-nature","9":"category-thread"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/605308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=605308"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/605308\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/605309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=605308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=605308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=605308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}