vision
Old tree said:
The burr of the blade and the collision of the trunk broke the embrace that had been held for centuries. My grove—in which the memory had been implanted—found itself drained of life by the sound and intensity of the saw.
I was alone, watching the seasons become unstable. I was alone, looking at the Frostwippler the Flower. I was alone, watching the fever deepen and linger. I was left alone and lost hope of restoring the forest.
Then the humans returned. Using plows instead of saws, they broke up the ground again. In the reopened wounds they sow you, whose roots embrace all of me, and you who taste the unknown.
Together, we may be able to withstand these changes.
— Drabble by Siris Valentine
spotlight
On a nearly cloudless August day, I arrived from the Mountains, escorted by Sound Greenway Trust staff, to the gate of a waist-high steel fence in Washington’s Markworth State Forest. Sound Greenway Trust is a Seattle nonprofit organization that preserves and restores the easternmost portion of the forest. Mountains line toward Puget Sound — Area known as the Mountains to Sound Greenway National Heritage Area. In 1900, Weyerhaeuser second largest North American lumber company — Purchased first 900,000 acres The location of Timberland’s greenway today. “For better or worse, this was the birth of industrial timber,” said John Hoekstra, executive director of the trust. For 35 years, conservation groups and neighboring tribes have worked diligently to weave the animal, Hoekstra said. devastated forest We will come together again through various projects.
On this particular day, Kate Fancher, the Trust’s restoration project manager, took me into the woods. Stossel Creek PlantationIt is located approximately 32 miles northeast of Seattle at the base of the Cascade Mountains. Stossel Creek is a unique project among the approximately 40 currently managed by the Trust. Here, Fancher is overseeing a multiyear experiment in an urgent new approach to forest management: assisted migration. This strategy involves intentionally modifying the range of certain trees to make forests more resilient to climate change.
“I’m not used to this kind of experimentation; it’s usually more informal,” she said. “But I think it’s really important to see what we can get out of this and potentially connect that to future restoration work.”
Mr Fancher (right) and Sarah Lemon, a public relations consultant employed by the trust, head to the Stossel Creek restoration site in August. Siris Valentine/Grist
For the past several decades, the standard best practice for reforestation projects has been to source native trees from local nurseries that collect seeds from nearby forests. Forest geneticist Sally Aitken later told me that forest managers learned the hard way that locally grown seedlings were more likely to survive. In early large-scale tree-planting campaigns, seedlings sourced from native, non-local trees had great difficulty establishing themselves in environments to which they were not adapted. Many people died. Those that survived often did not grow as tall or as healthy as locally produced specimens.
“Forest geneticists have spent decades convincing foresters that they should use local tree populations to obtain seeds for plantations,” he says. Aitken, who has studied the effects of
But with climate change creating both new extremes and new normals beyond the ranges that native species have evolved to tolerate, some forest managers are focusing on the future rather than the current climate. We support an approach that replants trees that are adapted to our climate.
This may mean introducing a species into an ecosystem where it has never existed before, although in most cases, such as at Stossel Creek, the species is the same as one already present in the forest. Individual seedlings are trucked in from other areas and selected based on their environment. I’ve adapted.
The trust and its partners planted trees in the Stossel Creek area that originate from a climate similar to the warm, dry climate the Pacific Northwest is expected to experience in the future. Some of the 14,000 seedlings planted at this site traveled more than 500 miles north from California to reach their new home.
The experiment emerged after the city’s power company, Seattle City Light, purchased 154 acres in 2015 that a logging company had cleared three years earlier. City Light acquired the land from Protect salmon and steelhead habitat As part of a broader commitment to environmental stewardship, the utility partnered with the Trust and several other organizations to coordinate mass planting of climate-smart trees in 2019. The hope is to reseed the land with trees adapted to hotter, drier conditions. Cross-planting with locally grown seedlings will make the emerging forests “more resistant to heat, drought, pests, disease and wildfire,” he said. report The author is Rowan Braybrook, program director at Northwest Natural Resource Group, one of the Trust’s partners in this project.
To find out where to source trees that could be well adapted to the future climate of this particular forest, project designers Seed lot selection tool Developed by the U.S. Forest Service, Oregon State University, and the Conservation Biology Institute. This tool allows researchers and experts to experiment with a wide range of scenarios to determine where they can source seeds for their chosen climate scenario. In the case of Stossel Creek, project designers focused on: Worst-case climate predictions Over the next few decades, we will identify regions and nurseries in southern Oregon and northern California that can provide the best seedlings.
The specific regions of these two states were selected based on two main measures. One is the Summer Heat Moisture Index, which captures the increasing dryness of summers in the Northwest, and the other is the Average Coldest Month, which is an important consideration because Douglas Fir requires it. nice winter cold They come and grow in the spring. By selecting seedlings from across this range, Braybrook said they were able to use the Stossel Creek experiment to perform assisted movement “stress tests.”
“If you move too far and too fast, the biggest risk is cold damage,” Mr Aitken said. Climate change is causing temperatures to rise on average year after year, but at the same time, sudden severe cold wave You’re more likely to damage or kill trees born for the California sun.
But as I wandered around the Stossel Creek property with Fancher, weaving through rows of young trees surrounded by plastic mesh skirts to protect them from grazing elk and deer, the 2019 After reviewing the data collected in the four years since large-scale tree planting took place in I was surprised at how much the California Douglas firs liked the new climate that had emerged west of the Cascade foothills.
Of the three nurseries, one each from Washington, Oregon, and California, California dags survived best and grew fastest, followed closely by Oregon fir. More than 90 percent of fir sourced from neighboring countries to the south survived until 2023, according to data collected through September last year, while the situation for fir sourced from Washington’s iconic evergreen forests remains The situation is even worse, with only 73% surviving. According to a report released last year by the Northwest Natural Resources Group,Although it is still too early to draw major conclusions from the experiment, these early results indicate that reforestation efforts could be enhanced by planting trees to suit future climates. It seems there is.
Left: A row of Douglas fir planted in one of the test plots on Stossel Creek leading to the weather station. Right: Maritime pine planted next to a stump in one of the test plots. Siris Valentine/Grist
Despite the results of experiments conducted on Stossel Creek and other worlds, Eastern US similarly canada and mexicoassisted migration remains a controversial practice. “The Forest Service still requires the use of local seed stocks for most restoration work,” said John Hoekstra, with the goal of preserving local adaptation. Hoekstra, Aitken and others are increasingly realizing that these local adaptations may not be compatible with future climates. Still, they said forest managers often focus on mitigating short-term risks and may be reluctant to assist with relocation. “The safest way to establish a tree today is not necessarily the best one in the long term,” Aitken says.
Relocation assistance inherently goes against decades of conservation wisdom and represents a level of intervention that some people find disturbing. Mr Aitken also pointed out that it was not the right approach in all circumstances. “If you have an established, intact forest ecosystem that hasn’t been hit hard by climate, pests, disease, etc., I don’t think there’s a need to intervene at this point,” she says. She also advises caution when moving species outside of their defined ranges. Plant Sequoias in Washington. “That would fundamentally change that ecosystem.”
Ultimately, however, ecosystems are changing, and as Grist has previously highlighted, approaches like assisted migration are needed to recognize and direct the significant changes humans are already making to landscapes. Some people think this is the best way. When planning and implementing conservation projects, forest managers “need to balance the risks of movement against the risks of doing nothing, and the appropriate decision will depend on the circumstances,” Aitken said. .
— Siris Valentine
further exposure
parting shot
Transition assistance is also being considered as a potential strategy. Helping animals whose habitats are threatened by climate change — like the key deer, a subspecies of white-tailed deer that lives only on the islands of the Florida Keys. With only about 1,000 left in the wild and their habitat threatened by rising sea levels, some argue for the species to be relocated. Here, a doe (smaller than its mainland cousin, about the size of a golden retriever) crosses Key Deer Boulevard on Big Pine Key.
