Redwoods AND Climate Change INITIATIVE

More than 144 million years ago, amid the dinosaurs, redwoods’ ancestors flourished across the globe. In response to an ever-changing climate, they retreated from the vast majority of their range. Now, throughout the current redwood range, we are experiencing temperature increases, less coastal fog, reductions in snowpack and earlier snowmelt.

Climate change will interact with many other stressors that the redwoods had not experienced before the Industrial Revolution. When gold was discovered in California in 1849, the hundreds of thousands of people who rushed to the state needed buildings, and redwoods were logged extensively to meet the demand. By the 1960s, only a small fraction of the original 2 million acres of ancient coast redwood forest remained. In addition to this extensive logging, humans introduced other stressors to the redwood forest, including invasive species, fire suppression, air pollution and habitat fragmentation.

Today, redwoods stand at a critical point. The current and projected interactions of these stressors jeopardize more than 90 years of League conservation work. We must act today to protect redwoods from these threats in the future.

Save the Redwoods League has united leading scientists Stephen C. Sillett and Robert Van Pelt of Humboldt State University and Todd Dawson and Anthony Ambrose of the University of California, Berkeley to launch the Initiative. Their studies will yield results that quantify redwoods’ vulnerabilities to climatic changes and their capacities to mitigate these changes via photosynthesis, fog interception, wood production and carbon sequestration. They are uniquely qualified, in part, because they have developed many of the methods to obtain the study’s data.

The scientists are

• studying whole-tree and whole-forest rates of annual wood production back 1,000 years in forest plots throughout the redwood ranges. These measurements will help the team predict tree and forest growth in response to changing climates
• reconstructing past climates to learn how redwoods responded to environmental conditions
• assessing how redwoods are responding to current conditions
• planning to manipulate temperature, carbon dioxide and water in greenhouse experiments to examine how redwood seedlings and saplings from different parts of the ranges might react to climatic changes

Possible ways the Initiative findings could help redwoods survive in the future include:

• protecting cooler and moister habitats so the trees will have a place to grow if their current range becomes too warm or dry
• guiding economic incentives for sustainable logging practices
• developing more sophisticated water and buffer management in the forecasted redwood range, in partnership with redwood forest landowners
• informing new public policy