Of the remaining 1.6 million acres (6,475 sq km) still growing trees, only 5% has never been logged and contains the iconic forest giants, the tallest trees on the planet. Of that, around 400,000 acres (1,619 sq km) of land have been paved, urbanised, and otherwise irrevocably converted. The ancient redwood forest once occupied 2 million acres (8,094 sq km) of fog-bathed coastal hills, from central California to the Oregon border. Redwoods Rising, a partnership between the Redwood National and State Parks and the Save the Redwoods League, reaches just 600 acres (2.4 sq km) annually. Unfortunately, these laudable recovery efforts are currently confined, like the old growth, to tiny islands scattered within a battered forest landscape. The response can be equally swift as sunlight returns to the floor of a thinned forest, diversifying understory plants. Ben Blom, director of stewardship and restoration for Save the Redwoods League, says that coho salmon can reappear a year after roads are repaired and stop bleeding sediment into creeks. While redwood forest restoration is largely a gift to the distant future, some life comes back quickly. Van Pelt and colleagues point out that in a bona fide old-growth ecosystem some of the trees are old enough to fall over and decompose, forming "a silvatic mosaic much older than its oldest trees". Redwoods get big after a few hundred years but take much longer to develop their most unique features, such as dazzling canopy gardens of ferns, berry bushes, small trees and fauna normally found on the forest floor. "The only vegetation that grows faster is sorghum and sugarcane," says University of Washington scientist Robert Van Pelt.īut a redwood forest still takes a long time to grow, and, in an era when short-term thinking threatens the very liveability of our planet, it's extraordinary that people are investing careers and great sums of money in these projects. That's three to five times as much as even the oldest secondary forests. Operations began in 2020 and have been gaining urgency, as the impacts of climate change have become a part of everyday life in the region, and a growing body of science has shown that old-growth redwoods store more aboveground carbon than any forest on Earth, up 2,600 tonnes per hectare (0.01 sq km). Restoration has drawn recent attention and picked up momentum with the launch of Redwoods Rising, an ambitious recovery program. Tactics include one-time thinning of dense stands, prescribed fire, closing roads, dropping trees in streams to make salmon-friendly pools, ongoing selective logging to favour a few large trees, and just leaving the forests alone. Land managers are trying to actively nurture some of them into new old growth. Overall, the public owns over 100,000 acres (405 sq km) of injured, young forest on federal and state land. Created in two phases, in 19, 75% of our national park had been razed. But it was the first from which most of the old growth had already been removed. Several small California state parks had been created decades earlier. The national park was not the first redwood park. When the National Park Service recommended a park again in 1964, bipartisan support in the Senate, a nod from President Johnson and, I believe, the trees' own power to inspire eventually got a deal through Congress. It was a long time coming, with proposals blocked in the 1920s, 30s and 40s by an industry that was beavering through the most valuable timberlands on the planet. Lyndon Johnson signed the bill that established the Redwood National Park in California 55 years ago. An initiative to restore these forests is gaining momentum, aided by research showing that redwoods store more aboveground carbon than any forest on Earth. Only 5% of California's redwood forests have never been logged.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |