Team of researchers find wildfire is future to saving California's giant sequoias
SACRAMENTO — Wildfires were once seen as the downfall of the treasured giant sequoia trees in California's Sierra Nevada mountains, but a team of researchers with the John Muir Project released a recent study outlining how they could be our best shot at saving them.
"We have been witnessing the slow death of these giant sequoia populations for decades, and almost no one's been doing anything about it because we've been treating them like museums," said Dr. Chad Hanson, who co-authored a recent study about the subject. "They're not museums. They're living ecosystems that were born in fire from an evolutionary standpoint. They thrive on it. They need it."
His team has been monitoring the giant sequoia reproduction in the Redwood Mountain Grove, impacted by the 2021 KNP Complex fire. They say regeneration is happening faster in areas where the fire burned the hottest.
"Sequoias have evolved to only really release their seeds from the cones when a fire burns, and not just when any fire burns but only when it burns hot enough to melt the resins and the cones by the millions," Dr. Hanson said.
Experts disagree about the right way to handle recent devastating fires with some steps being taken to try and keep fires from burning in some of the more iconic groves. Dr. Hanson believes the lack of heat and absence of fire over the last century is actually the reason our population has dwindled to just 80,000.
"For about 120 years, because we have been very successfully keeping wildfires out of these groves for over a century until recent years," Dr. Hanson said. "So, the mature ones, the old ones, have been dying. They haven't been replacing themselves because there's been almost no regeneration."
A recent article published by Reuters claimed sequoia trees are thriving in the United Kingdom, where they have reached numbers surpassing 500,000. Dr. Hanson said that doesn't tell the full story.
"You can plant sequoias in the UK and some of them will survive, but they're not going to reproduce," Dr. Hanson said.
The lack of wildfires in the UK makes the future of sequoias uncertain but almost solidifies the survival in the Sierra Nevada.
"So what I want people to know is that these recent fires have not been a disaster in the Sequoia groves. They have not. They're not the doom of Sequoias. They're the salvation of the giant sequoias," Dr. Hanson said.
Hanson is the author of the 2021 book, "Smokescreen: Debunking Wildfire Myths to Save Our Forests and Our Climate" and hopes to cut through some of the misconceptions about the complicated evolution of certain species.
