Treesearch

As California continues into a fifth year of drought, tree mortality enhanced by the unprecedented bark beetle epidemic contributes to wildfires that continue to increase in frequency and severity. Recent fires have posed increasing fire suppression challenges, life safety concerns, post fire watershed impacts and lasting damage to forested landscapes. The ability of California forestlands to sequester and store carbon has become a matter of national and international significance. Greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere are altering the climate, and public and private land managers...

Crossdated tree-ring chronologies for the Arcata Community Forest (ACF) and Muir Woods National Monument (Muir Woods) expand the spatial coverage of dated coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens (D. Don) Endl.) series. Crossdating relies on the common pattern of ring-width variation among tree populations, and dated chronologies have many applications, including climate analysis, growth analysis, tree age calculations, reconstructing fire histories, and archeological dating. While coast redwood poses many challenges to crossdating (e.g., ring wedging, locally-absent rings, and discontinuous...

Mature second-growth redwood (Sequoia sempervirens (D. Don) Endl.) forests are an important and uncommon resource in the redwood region. Development of second-growth redwood forests beyond rotation age is not well understood. Continuous long-term data are especially lacking, considering that the maximum possible age of second-growth stands is now over 150 years. Two observation plots established in 1923 in the Arcata Community Forest provide a unique opportunity to examine the long-term development of second-growth redwood forest.

Coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens (D. Don) Endl.) height growth and basal area growth are sensitive to variations in site quality. Site factors known to be correlated with redwood stand growth and yield include topographic variables such as position on slope, exposure, and the composite variable: topographic relative moisture index. Species composition is also a key driver of redwood stand growth and yield. We studied spatial patterns in species composition in terms of percent hardwood, and spatial patterns in topographic relative moisture index values across 109 ha (270 ac) of coast...

There is a tremendous amount of variation in the second growth redwood (Sequoia sempervirens (D. Don) Endl.) forests found along the North Coast of California. In order to make prudent management decisions about these forests, foresters and other resource professionals often conduct timber cruises to collect information on tree species, diameters, tree heights, crown ratios, bole taper, and other variables of interest. When designing point sample timber cruises to collect these data, it is important not only to consider sample size (the number of point samples), but to also consider how...

This introductory paper highlights some of the changes in redwood region land ownership, markets and infrastructure to help contextualize the dynamic nature of the forest industry in California and to help set the stage for a management and policy dialog among symposia participants. Twenty years have passed from the first redwood symposium in 1996 and with this so too have the conservation and management issues changed among regional stakeholders. Through 70 talks delivered in plenary and concurrent sessions, a poster session, and four field trip choices, session participants had the...

Humans have no doubt observed the coast redwood, Sequoia sempervirens (D. Don) Endl., in wonder for thousands of years. It is no small task to seek understanding of a species whose sheer size cannot readily be assessed from the ground and whose generation time can exceed that of humans by 100 times. Fortunately, the scientific method has provided a steadfast approach to study, describe, and explore many aspects of S. sempervirens ecology in recent centuries.This review focuses on select aspects of coast redwood ecology that illustrate how redwood research has progressed and proliferated...

Of perhaps all forests in North America, the fire regime of coast redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens (D. Don) Endl.) is most enigmatic. Widely considered a temperate rainforest, a large number of fire history studies depict a forest dominated by frequent surface fire regimes. Coast redwood also has a long list of traits that allow it to persist and dominate under such a chronic fire regime: thick bark, flammable litter, ability to resprout, and rapid pruning. Determining how redwood fire regimes functioned is a major question for restoration and conservation efforts. The origins of frequent...

Twenty years ago the Redwood region was dominated by the so called “timber wars”. On public lands the Northwest Forest Plan forced a new ecosystem management approach. On private lands, the Headwaters Forest initiative and Redwood Summer events were forcing state and federal regulators and landowners to rethink forest management strategies on private lands. The foundation for these debates focused on traditional views of public versus private ownership and to what degree environmental protection and intensive forestry could be applied.Twenty years later, the Redwood region has become a...

Yellow pine and mixed-conifer (YPMC) forests are the predominant montane forest type in the Sierra Nevada, southern Cascade Range, and neighboring forested areas on the Modoc and Inyo National Forests (the "assessment area"). YPMC forests occur above the oak woodland belt and below red fir forests, and are dominated by the yellow pines (ponderosa pine [Pinus ponderosa Lawson & C. Lawson] and Jeffrey pine [Pinus jeffreyi Balf.]); white fir (Abies concolor (Gord. & Glend.) Lindl. ex Hildebr.); sugar pine (P. lambertiana Douglas); incense cedar (Calocedrus decurrens (Torr.) Florin); and black...