Jennie Dusheck
The Climate Alliance (TCA)
In October, 2022, I opened an email from my friend Nancy Abrams inviting me to an intriguing weekend retreat at the University of California’s Big Creek Reserve in Big Sur, California. The weekend was the brainchild of UC Santa Cruz’s famed cosmologist Sandy Faber and the Earth Futures Institute. The primary topics for the weekend—art and climate change—were close to my heart. I couldn’t have been more delighted and I quickly applied to attend.
Big Sur has long been a magnet for luminaries such as poet Robinson Jeffers and photographer Ansel Adams. Big Creek Reserve itself is known mainly for ecological research. So it made sense that the weekend—co-hosted by UCSC professors Rachel Meyer (Ecology & Evolutionary Biology) and Ed Shanken (Digitial Arts)—would focus on climate change and art. The weekend included a score of scientists and artists and featured a day-long hike through the redwoods.
Art students stopped along the way to do quick watercolors of ferns; Professor Meyer showed us how to collect environmental DNA from the creek side; a small contingent of tired hikers stopped to bathe in the creek; and, at the end of the day, we took turns looking through a telescope at our neighboring planets.
For me, though, the beating heart of the weekend was the redwoods. Coast redwood forests rim California’s coastline from southern Oregon to the Santa Lucia Mountains of Big Sur. Ten thousand years ago, redwoods extended all the way to Los Angeles. Today, the very southernmost grove lies just 23 miles south of Big Creek. We were at the bleeding edge of coast redwoods’ natural range.
The Santa Lucia redwoods are physically and genetically isolated from their northern cousins and likely adapted to the dryer south coast, clinging to life in a handful of damp, shady canyons such as Big Creek.
As California’s climate warms and droughts become longer, it’s fair to ask about the future of these trees. Will the isolated Santa Lucia subpopulation go extinct as summers grow hotter, dryer, and longer? It’s not out of the question. Of the 881 tree species native to the contiguous United States, about 132 are already in danger of extinction.
The loss of the Santa Lucia redwoods would devastate the Big Sur ecosystem. But their fate is also important because, when it comes to climate change, natural carbon sequestration is critical. And redwoods are masters of carbon sequestration.
One coast redwood can store 250 times as much carbon as an ordinary tree. A coast redwood forest stores more carbon per acre than any other kind of forest on the planet. A single acre of coast redwood forest can store 1100 metric tons of carbon a year, an amount equal to the annual carbon emissions of 17 acres of housing (about 137 homes).
Redwoods’ knack for carbon sequestration rests on both their size and their longevity. They can grow up to 380 feet tall and live to be 2500 years old. That means when these trees sequester carbon, it can stay put for hundreds or even thousands of years.
And it’s not just ancient, old-growth redwoods that store mega amounts of carbon. Younger redwoods grow extraordinarily fast. One study found that in just 150 years, fast-growing second-growth redwood forests stored nearly a third as much carbon as their older cousins.
Finally, the coast redwoods at Big Creek demonstrate the trees’ enormous capacity for regeneration after disaster. In the fall of 2020, the Dolan Fire burned 8000 acres at Big Creek Reserve, including hundreds of redwoods.
And then, as if that was not enough, four months later, the denuded slopes of the reserve were hit by a winter storm that dropped 14 inches of rain in just two days. In the midst of the storm, a violent debris flow carried giant redwood logs and boulders the size of trucks down the Big Creek drainage.
On our hike, we saw piles of sand, rock and logs that, in places, rose 20 feet above the bottom of the creek.
Amazingly, in just two years, nearly all the burned redwoods had sprouted vigorous new growth.
And springing from the rocky debris flow along both banks of Big Creek was a green carpet of hundreds of thousands of redwood seedlings eagerly reaching for the blue sky above the scoured creek.
As we plan for Earth’s altered future, these infant redwoods may hold the key to the long-term survival of California’s coast redwoods. A recent study out of UC Davis found that coast redwood trees were undergoing recent and ongoing genetic adaptation to climate change along moisture and temperature gradients.
Redwoods’ apparent ability to adapt to climate change could buttress their long-term survival, providing a small but persistent buffer against increasing human greenhouse gas emissions.
At the very least, giant coast redwoods’ resilience should give us hope. Redwoods aren’t giving up, and neither should we.
Jennie Dusheck is a science writer living in Santa Cruz, California.
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