climate change

Students measure fern fronds through a Save the Redwoods League education program at Redwood Regional Park. Photo ©Save the Redwoods League.

Our Redwood Classrooms

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Bay Area residents got a sneak peek into the hopes and dreams of the Department of the Interior last week when Secretary Sally Jewell came to Crissy Field (external link) to announce the department’s new campaign to connect the next …

A Redwood of a Blog: How the Giant Trees Grow

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RCCI’s nursery experiments and tree ring analyses are essential to understanding the past and future of the redwood forest, but it is the trees themselves that tell us about its present. By establishing 16 large plots in old-growth forests throughout …

Climate Change Discoveries Make Media Splash

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You may have heard about the surprising discoveries of the League’s Redwoods and Climate Change Initiative (RCCI) program, which drew unprecedented media coverage yesterday. Did you see the coverage in the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News, the …

A Summer of Ferns

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The best part of the year for any field ecologist like myself, is the stretch of long summer days spent outside collecting data. Over the past two months, I journeyed into the coast redwood forest to take measurements in our …

Share and Share Alike

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In an early version of a now-famous passage, John Muir wrote, “When we try to pick out anything by itself we find that it is bound fast by a thousand invisible cords that cannot be broken, to everything in the …

Researcher Wendy Baxter climbs a fixed rope up into a 86.6m-tall giant sequoia tree at Calaveras Big Trees State Park. Photo by Anthony Ambrose

Barking up the Right Tree

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It’s summertime and redwood researchers are putting on their climbing gear and ascending  into the leafy crowns of giant sequoias. A slow climb is worth the effort to see how the giants are growing. But why climb hundreds of feet …

Researcher Emily Burns noticed that half the ferns in coast redwood forests were evergreen and half were deciduous. Deciduous ferns turn white in the fall while the evergreen ferns stay vibrant green.

Deciduous Ferns May Hold Advantage as Climate Changes

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In 2010, funded by Save the Redwoods League and the National Science Foundation, Professor Jarmila Pittermann and Burns began a study comparing the leaves of evergreen and deciduous ferns. Interested in their response to drought, they chose midsummer, just before the deciduous ferns would shed their leaves, in the drier southern part of coast redwoods’ range (in the Santa Cruz Mountains and Big Sur). They expected that evergreen leaves, which are thicker, would show fewer signs of water stress.

Researchers sampled coast redwoods' DNA at the Russell Research Station in Contra Costa County, California. Photo by Richard S. Dodd

Central California Redwoods More Vulnerable

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Researchers found in a 2007 study that coast redwoods’ genetic diversity was “very high” throughout the state, and more divergent in Central California. These Central California redwoods are most threatened by climate change and “should be a conservation priority,” said Richard S. Dodd, a professor of plant population genetics at the University of California, Berkeley.