Coast Redwoods | Giant Sequoias
Working with trees that live 2,000 years requires long-term planning and sustained effort. Our new Master Plan for the Redwoods guides our efforts to protect and restore redwood forests. This plan identifies and prioritizes redwood landscapes, protecting and enhancing investments made over the last 90 years.
The Master Plan also identifies opportunities to collaborate with conservation partners such as The Nature Conservancy and local land trusts.
To create the Master Plan, Save the Redwoods League and teams of forest scientists, park rangers, and conservationists worked with local experts to examine the values and threats to coast redwoods across their natural range.
The Master Plan incorporates the theory and principles of conservation biology, which are explained in The Redwood Forest: History, Ecology, and Conservation of the Coast Redwoods, edited by Reed Noss and published in 2000 by Save the Redwoods League and Island Press. These principles guide Save the Redwoods to acquire land to protect large blocks of contiguous redwood habitat that capture the diversity of the forest.
The Master Plan uses geographic information system (GIS) technology to focus and guide conservation efforts. It includes 16 criteria that identify areas that are important to protect. Examples are:
More about the Master Plan for the Coast Redwoods
Order or learn more about the book, The Redwood Forest: History, Ecology, and Conservation of the Coast Redwoods, edited by Reed Noss and published in 2000 by Save the Redwoods League and Island Press.
In addition to the Master Plan for the Coast Redwoods, we evaluated the conservation status of the dawn redwood and completed the Master Plan for the Giant Sequoias. The giant sequoia plan incorporates input regarding the trees’ natural range from more than a dozen giant sequoia managers and scientists, including those from the US Forest Service, the US Geological Survey and the Trust for Public Land.
Guiding the League’s giant sequoia conservation actions, the giant sequoia portion of the Master Plan primarily entails land acquisitions. Only 77 giant sequoia groves
remain scattered across the Sierra Nevada, making Sequoiadendron giganteum a rare species.
Although more than 90 percent of giant sequoia grove acreage is in public ownership, opportunities to purchase more than 6,100 acres of priority inholdings and buffer lands still exist. The need to protect these great trees is urgent as they face the major threats of residential and commercial development. Another threat is linked to decades of fire suppression, which has allowed leaf litter to accumulate.
Periodic fires are needed to clear this leaf litter so sequoia seedlings can grow. Accumulated leaf litter also can fuel intense fires that can kill or damage larger sequoias. Global climate change also poses a major threat.
In the plan, the League prioritizes giant sequoia acreage to protect according to feasibility factors and groves’ degree of isolation, because isolated groves are more
likely to be genetically unique.
The plan also includes recommendations for supporting major research, including giant sequoia groves’ genetic variation and how they are affected by fire and climate
change.