Treesearch

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...

The global human population has more than tripled in the past century, reaching seven billion in 2012. The total footprint of humanity on the biosphere has more than doubled since the mid-twentieth century (Vitousek et al. 1997). Every year globally more than 14 million hectares of natural forest are converted to other land uses (FAO 2011), and many other ecosystems, such as temperate grasslands, are mere remnants of their original area. More than 30% of Earth’s annual primary productivity is utilized directly by humans (Vitousek et al. 1986) and between one-third and one-half of Earth’s...

Shifting fire regimes alter forest structure assembly in ponderosa pine forests and may produce structural heterogeneity following stand-replacing fire due, in part, to fine-scale variability in growing environments. We mapped tree regeneration in eighteen plots 11 to 15 years after stand-replacing fire in Colorado and South Dakota, USA. We used point pattern analyses to examine the spatial pattern of tree locations and heights as well as the influence of tree interactions and topography on tree patterns. In these sparse, early-seral forests, we found that all species were spatially...

The use of dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs) to estimate CO2 emissions from land-use and land-cover change (LULCC) offers a new window to account for spatial and temporal details of emissions and for ecosystem processes affected by LULCC. One drawback of LULCC emissions from DGVMs, however, is lack of observation constraint. Here, we propose a new method of using satellite- and inventory-based biomass observations to constrain historical cumulative LULCC emissions (EcLUC) from an ensemble of nine DGVMs based on emerging relationships between simulated vegetation biomass and EcLUC....

Forests play an important role in global carbon cycles. However, the lack of available information on carbon stocks in dead organic matter, including woody debris and litter, reduces the reliability of assessing the carbon cycles in entire forest ecosystems. Here we estimate that the national DOM carbon stock in the period of 2004–2008 is 925 ± 54 Tg, with an average density of 5.95 ± 0.35 Mg C ha−1. Over the past two decades from periods of 1984−1988 to 2004−2008, the national dead organic matter carbon stock has increased by 6.7 ± 2.2 Tg carbon per year, primarily due to increasing...

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...

There is no more iconic tree or more closely watched forest ecosystem than coast redwood. With its limited range and high value, the coast redwood forest is a microcosm of many of the emerging science and management issues facing today’s forested landscapes. As new information is collected and new management approaches and treatments tried, it is critical that policies and strategies guiding use and management within the redwood region be reviewed and updated based on objective scientific information. With changes in California’s demographic makeup, land ownership, and the regional...