Posts Tagged ‘redwoods’
“One feels the need to bow to unquestioned sovereigns”*…
Confronting ancient redwoods can be a transformative experience, helping us appreciate both our place in a larger scheme and the transitory nature of our lives.
The earliest redwoods showed up on Earth shortly after the dinosaurs – before flowers, birds, spiders… and, of course, humans. Redwoods have been around for about 240 million years, and in California for at least 20 million years, compared to about 200,000 years for “modern” humans. – source
But redwoods also play a key role in our ecosystem…
The coast redwood and giant sequoia forests are home to the tallest and largest trees on the planet. They represent the original face of nature, embodying a beauty millions of years in the making. These forests store more carbon from the atmosphere than any other forest ecosystem, and they support communities of life found nowhere else on Earth.
The redwood forests are the greatest forests on Earth.
But the redwood parks and private lands we have protected over the last century still need help. The primeval forests today resemble islands of disconnected old-growth stands — pinched at the edges by clear-cuts, development and agriculture. They depend on streams choked by sediment, and they are cared for by parks organizations that are under-funded and under-resourced… – source
* John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley in Search of America
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As we prioritize preservation, we might spare a thought for Charlemagne; he died on this date in 814. A ruler who united the majority of western and central Europe (first as King of the Franks, then also King of the Lombards, finally adding Emperor of the Romans), he was the first recognized emperor to rule from western Europe since the fall of the Western Roman Empire three centuries earlier; the expanded Frankish state that he founded is called the Carolingian Empire, the predecessor to the Holy Roman Empire.
Committed to educational reform and extension, he began (in 789) the establishment of schools teaching the elements of mathematics, grammar, music, and ecclesiastic subjects; every monastery and abbey in his realm was expected to have a school for the education of the boys of the surrounding villages. The tradition of learning he initiated helped fuel the expansion of medieval scholarship in the 12th-century Renaissance.
Charlemagne is considered the father of modern Europe, the first of the Holy Roman Emperors, and thus the forerunner of the Holy Roman Empire. At the same time, in accepting Pope Leo’s investiture, he set up ages of conflict: Charlemagne’s coronation as Emperor, though intended to represent the continuation of the unbroken line of Emperors from Augustus, had the effect of creating up two separate (and often opposing) Empires– the Roman and the Byzantine– with two separate claims to imperial authority. It led to war in 802, and for centuries to come, the Emperors of both West and East would make competing claims of sovereignty over the whole.
We might note that as Charlemagne’s life unfolded, the oldest (officially-recognized) living Redwood was already 400 years old (though some foresters believe some coast redwoods may be as much as 1,000-1,500 years older).
“The redwood is one of the few conifers that sprout from the stump and roots, and it declares itself willing to begin immediately to repair the damage of the lumberman and also that of the forest-burner”*…
Nature plans ahead: how redwoods survive fire…
When lightning ignited fires around California’s Big Basin Redwoods State Park north of Santa Cruz in August 2020, the blaze spread quickly. Redwoods naturally resist burning, but this time flames shot through the canopies of 100-meter-tall trees, incinerating the needles. “It was shocking,” says Drew Peltier, a tree ecophysiologist at Northern Arizona University. “It really seemed like most of the trees were going to die.”
Yet many of them lived. In a paper published [in late November] in Nature Plants, Peltier and his colleagues help explain why: The charred survivors, despite being defoliated, mobilized long-held energy reserves—sugars that had been made from sunlight decades earlier—and poured them into buds that had been lying dormant under the bark for centuries.
“This is one of those papers that challenges our previous knowledge on tree growth,” says Adrian Rocha, an ecosystem ecologist at the University of Notre Dame. “It is amazing to learn that carbon taken up decades ago can be used to sustain its growth into the future.” The findings suggest redwoods have the tools to cope with catastrophic fires driven by climate change, Rocha says. Still, it’s unclear whether the trees could withstand the regular infernos that might occur under a warmer climate regime.
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It’s not just the energy reserves that are old. The sprouts were emerging from buds that began forming centuries ago. Redwoods and other tree species create budlike tissue that remains under the bark. Scientists can trace the paths of these buds, like a worm burrowing outward. In samples taken from a large redwood that had fallen after the fire, Peltier and colleagues found that many of the buds, some of which had sprouted, extended back as much as 1000 years. “That was really surprising for me,” Peltier says. “As far as I know, these are the oldest ones that have been documented.”
Although the redwoods have sprouted new growth, Peltier and other forest experts wonder how the trees will cope with far less energy from photosynthesis, given that it will be years before they grow as many needles as they had before the fire. “They’re alive, but I would be a little concerned for them in the future.”
Another question is how the redwoods would cope if a second catastrophic fire strikes soon. Have they used up their emergency reserves? “The fact that the reserves used are so old indicates that they took a long time to build up,” says Susan Trumbore, a radiocarbon expert at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry. “Redwoods are majestic organisms. One cannot help rooting for those resprouts to keep them alive in decades to come.”…
After a devastating conflagration, trees regrow using energy stored long ago: “Ancient redwoods recover from fire by sprouting 1000-year-old buds,” from @ScienceMagazine.
* John Muir
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As we learn from nature, we might spare a thought for Louis Agassiz; he died on this date in 1873. A biologist and geologist, he was an important early scholar of Earth’s natural history. After studying with Georges Cuvier and Alexander von Humboldt in Paris, Agassiz was appointed professor of natural history at the University of Neuchâtel. He emigrated to the United States in 1847 after visiting Harvard University and went on to become professor of zoology and geology at Harvard, to head its Lawrence Scientific School, and to found its Museum of Comparative Zoology.
Agassiz is known for observational data gathering and analysis. He made institutional and scientific contributions to zoology, geology, and related areas, including multivolume research books running to thousands of pages. He founded the field of glaciology.
His second wife, Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz (née Cary) collaborated with him on much of his work and went on to found Radcliffe College.
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