photo by Orenda Randuch

Resetting Redwoods

A century and a half ago, as California’s economy expanded, settlers and industrialists began moving into the Santa Cruz Mountains and deciding what the redwood forests were for. Imagine seeing for the first time the dense understory of sky-scraping titans shading young redwoods in a diverse community that nourished wildlife and cooled creeks teeming with Coho-salmon. Navigating the untouched forest proved difficult and dangerous, but within the forests’ intricate ecosystem these newcomers also saw the potential to use the forest to grow cities like San Francisco and to establish new businesses, institutions, and more.

In an act of hubris, they forcibly carved roads into hillsides that gave their equipment access to each tree and stream, disrupting what had been thriving for thousands of millennia. Today, giant stumps, evenly-aged forests, and Coho-less creeks are the familiar scars of the once decimated forests. These crossings and structures continue to redirect water and sediment today; a large reason why in many places, protection alone cannot undo that damage. Restoring impacted forests begins by removing infrastructure designed for short-term extraction in mind.

Thanks to you, we steward more than 12,000 acres of protected land that we work to restore to nature for all of us.

Take a peek behind the trees at how you have helped the redwood forests of the Santa Cruz mountains–some of the most biodiverse and threatened on Earth–return to nature this year.

Removing Roads Less Traveled

While not all of the forests we protect have unsafe buildings and materials on them, nearly all of them have roads. Many were designed for short-term industrial uses rather than long-term stability on steep terrain. Some continue to provide necessary access to the forest for stewardship, wildlife monitoring, and emergency crews like firefighters. But unmaintained roads can add to the erosion of mountainsides, fragile after the CZU Fire and the extreme winter storms that followed.

With fewer plants to help hold soil in place, dirt roads can wash out, taking away the soil the recovering forest needs, and muddying critical water sources we and wildlife need. With your support, we were able to “rock” crucial access roads—establishing beds of crushed gravel—and decommission unnecessary roads to reduce soil erosion, improve water quality, and give the space back to the forest.

See Orenda Randuch’s photos before and after the removal of an unused road at the Lompico Headwaters you protected in 2006.

Rooting Out Invasive Species

Infrastructure isn’t the only thing humans brought into the redwoods. As people across the country and globe came to the Santa Cruz mountains, plants and creatures came with them. Invasive plants like French, Scotch, and Italian broom took root in places without pests and pathogens equipped to naturally keep them in check. A single plant, such as old man’s beard (Clematis vitalba), can quickly cover ground in the forest and strangle redwood trees. Invasive plants can be a double-edged sword to the heart of the forest as they go up the canopy. Not only can they grow quickly without natural checks—crowding out the native plants the redwood forest and its creatures rely upon—they are also less fire-resilient—making their big growth a big pile of fuel for a wildfire.

A seemingly harmless sounding species, periwinkle (Vinca major), is particularly difficult to remove because any root left in the soil will regenerate into new plants. Thanks to you, invasive periwinkle and French broom removal projects began in the summer of 2024 in the redwood forest you protected at Lompico Headwaters. In 2025 and beyond, the work has continued as a returning project so native plants can re-establish themselves on the forest floor. Your support allows us to remove invasive plants, their deep roots and copious seeds, so these invaded patches do not become a persistent source of dry, flashy fuel in the hotter, drier years predicted to come.

See our Stewardship Team's photos before and after work to remove a patch of periwinkle from the forest by hand.

Returning Redwoods to Nature and Resilience

The truth is: redwood forests still bear the scars of a history marked by profoundly destructive human intervention. They have endured axes and bulldozers, but also lingering barriers like dams, buildings, and invasive species. What has changed is how we act now. Stewardship, for us, is the ongoing work of carefully and humbly understanding how to support forests toward what they once were, and what they still have the potential to become.

Protecting our last remaining redwood forests from further development is a crucial first step. By reducing human impacts left on the land, natural systems regain the capacity to respond, adapt, and recover. Together, we will continue to anchor broader efforts to renew watersheds, support resilient forests, and accelerate the collective well-being of ecosystems that redwoods are capable of achieving. With your help, our forests will be resilient and strong, able to support wildlife, clean water, fresh air, cooler temperatures, and healthy communities for generations to come.

The post A Stewardship Story: Return to Nature appeared first on Sempervirens Fund.

map by Ben Pease at PeasePress.com

California is full of redwood forests that have been changed by people with varied motivations. For thousands
of years, Indigenous tribes harvested plants and lit fires to thin the greenery in the understory of the mostly fire-resilient redwoods, gently coaxing the forests to meet their needs for food, medicine, and shelter. With European settlement and the forced removal of Indigenous people came clear-cut logging, first with handsaws and horses and later with powerful chain saws and destructive earthmovers. The settlers also took the view that all wildfires should be extinguished, largely to protect their lumber^{see footnote number 2}.

Clear-cutting arrived in the Santa Cruz Mountains in the 19th century, accelerating in the 20th century as the population of Northern California grew, creating demand for lumber as fuel, railroad track, and building material, especially as San Francisco rebuilt itself following the 1906 earthquake. By the 1920s, most of the biggest redwood trees were gone from these mountains, leaving behind armies of stumps. Regardless, a handful of lumber companies eked out a business cutting the region’s smaller trees, as well as managing redwoods with the intent to log them. At the time, people had been so successful at dousing wildfire that the last major one to burn the Santa Cruz Mountains was in 1884^{see footnote number 3}.

Sempervirens Fund purchased one of these heavily altered properties, called Redtree 236, in 2010. The redwoods were crowded shoulder-to-shoulder, on dirt eerily devoid of branches or fallen trunks. The forest “looked kind of artificial,” recalls Holderman. The former owners were “basically growing the trees like crops.” The land trust brought in consulting ecologists, soil experts, and foresters, including Nadia Hamey, to determine whether such a forest could be restored to a thriving ecosystem that supports thousands of other species. “We basically decided to try to figure out, how do you transition an industrial forest into an oldgrowth redwood forest?” Holderman says.

He was unsurprised by the consultants’ prescribed doses of selective logging as part of that solution. And he supported it. Many of his colleagues did not feel similarly. “I got a lot of blowback,” he remembers, bursting into deep guffaws. “Maybe a quarter of my board wanted to fire me.” The controversy was rooted in their belief that environmental stewardship meant letting nature heal itself and that over time, nature would sort it out. In this view, cutting trees was antithetical to conservation.

“Our argument was, ‘well, this is artificial,’” Holderman says. There was no way to know if an industrial forest would evolve into an old-growth forest, a process that can take millennia, but, he told doubters, “We know if we do this [active restoration], it’ll put this on a path to get there quicker.” So in 2011, Sempervirens began for the first time in its 125-year history to experiment with active restoration, cutting some trees to encourage others to thrive, and leaving felled trees on the ground to help restore the soil’s out-of-whack chemistry. Years of removal of fallen snags and old growth by the previous owner had left the soil nutrient poor. Sempervirens began felling trees with chain saws and moving them to modify a redwood forest for the benefit of the forest. “How you manage a forest to restore it, versus how you manage it to produce maximum commercial value, [these] have some overlapping similarities,” says Sara Barth, Sempervirens Fund’s current executive director, “but the end goals are quite different.”

Forester Nadia Hamey marks trees with blue paint she wants cut down. Here, in San Vicente Redwoods’ Deadman Gulch she encourages growth in the biggest oldest trees by felling nearby trees competing for resources.
photo by Orenda Randuch

Nadia Hamey was hired by Sempervirens and POST in 2011 to actively manage San Vicente Redwoods. She walked through the property with the conservation groups to assess the potential and challenges of the landscape. What did the land need and how would they pay for it? “When the cost of doing this came back,” Holderman says,“it scared the shit out of us.” The necessary forest restoration was complex; they knew it would ultimately require tens of millions of dollars, so the groups planned to start small at roughly $250,000 a year. That has grown to well over $1 million annually.

Holderman recalls a time he accompanied Hamey on one of the hikes, the two of them threading their way through the crowded stand of redwoods as she swiveled her attention across the forest-scape and hovered her finger before its specimens. She explained to Holderman that if she were working for Big Creek Lumber Company—a local sustainable logging company that had previously employed her—she would take and sell that tree, that tree, this tree, and that tree under the selective logging rules that applied in the Santa Cruz Mountains. But as a forester for a conservation organization like Sempervirens that was trying to restore an ecosystem, she would choose different trees. She’d also take this tree and that tree, pointing out a couple that were practically huddling in the shadow of their thicker, taller sibling, crowding its personal space.

The idea was to divvy up the 8,532 acres into three groups, each managed with a different goal. About a tenth of the property is preservation reserves, where the old-growth forest is healthy, and she does little besides weed and maintain roads and culverts. Working forest and restoration reserves account for the remaining acres. In the 3,700 acres of working forest—43 percent of the property— Hamey maintains an ecosystem with trees that might be sold. She picks out large, healthy redwoods—though not the biggest, oldest redwoods—that forestry contractors harvest and Sempervirens and co-owner POST sell to Big Creek as lumber. Annual lumber revenue fluctuates, and all of it is directed, along with public grants and private donations, to fund restoration elsewhere on the property and road repair, a cost that also fluctuates, and altogether it has amounted to about $775,000 over the last five years.

“Cutting down trees is hard—really hard. And it feels so counterintuitive to protecting forests,” says Sara Barth. Still, the partner organizations are seeing the long-term benefits of working forests taking shape. “We do not take it lightly. We want a new generation of old-growth redwoods to be established. And when we see the growth and canopies improve in the working forests we are seeing success.”

The goal is to return the restoration reserves to old-growth forest conditions, directing the chain saws away from the trees they would have been aimed at in the working forest. “You flip that on its head in the restoration reserves, and instead of removing some of the larger trees, you pretty much pick the winner,” explains Hamey. Having identified the one big champion redwood—a “future oldgrowth recruitment tree,” in technical language—you then “cut selectively around it.” Some of the accessible logs are removed to reduce fuel for wildfires, while others are either sold or burned for biomass, returning nutrients to the soil. Or as was the case for roughly 30 acres, a prescribed fire burned away the undergrowth and fallen vegetation. Tree-cutting is “the way that we make big adjustments,” Hamey says, and “as long as we don’t introduce weeds, the aftermath is amazingly cool.”

These practices are an attempt to emulate how plants, trees, and animal life interact within a forest ecosystem, enabling it to heal itself from natural disturbances such as wind, lightning storms, landslides, or pest infestations. Research that spans nearly 50 years in Redwood National Park demonstrates that the approach is working. An unnaturally dense second-growth redwood forest site there, called Holter Ridge—which averaged 2,400 trees per hectare in 1978, versus 25 to 90 trees per hectare in old-growth forests—has been thinned periodically since ’78, and the diversity of plants growing in the understory, as well as tree growth, has increased ^{see footnote number 4}.

But extensive disturbance can be a problem. Typically, the stumpy clear-cut redwood forests that have been left to recover on their own wind up far denser than old-growth forests. Where the old redwood crowns could sometimes span 100 feet, shading out everything below, felling these giants had the effect of bathing wide swaths of the forest floor in sunlight, encouraging the growth of other sun-loving and often less fire-resistant species. Today, these forests are largely occupied by them, especially hardwoods like tanoak and Doug fir. Yet all the trees, across every species, compete with one another for sunlight, water, and nutrients. The redwoods struggle to regain vigor. So Hamey thins the trees around the biggest redwoods to reduce that competition, a practice known as “crown release.” Her goal is to direct the growth of these mixed-species woods back into flourishing redwood forests that can weather (and thrive on) the occasional, moderate wildfire—their original state before European settlers arrived.

Nadia Hamey was born in the late 1970s and lived in logging camps on Vancouver Island, off the western coast of Canada. She saw industrial clear-cutting level the old forests of the Clayoquot Sound and, as a youth in the ’80s and ’90s, participated in activist blockades and protests. “It’s in my blood to fight,” she says with a chuckle. But her father, a forester, and her mother, a habitat protection officer, advised her that she wasn’t going to achieve her goals by creating roadblocks with her body and stopping loggers from getting to work. “You need to use your brain,” they told her, and “change the law.” So she enrolled at UC Berkeley and earned a degree in forestry.

“I was anti-,” Hamey reflects, on her attitude toward the timber industry. “I wanted to influence the unsound practices of logging.” Yet to learn the practice of forestry after graduation, she worked short stints for two of the biggest clear-cut logging companies on the West Coast, Weyerhaeuser and Simpson Timber Company. Then she landed a job in 2003 at Big Creek Lumber, a family-owned operation in the Santa Cruz Mountains that has been, at times, certified by the Forest Stewardship Council.

Big Creek Lumber is now responsible for selectively logging part of the working forest in San Vicente Redwoods, along with operating its own sawmill and managing other private timberlands. Janet McCrary Webb’s grandfather, great uncle, father, and uncle started the company in 1946, after World War II. They set up a portable sawmill and began harvesting some of the timber on a neighbor’s property in the Santa Cruz Mountains, just a few miles outside of where San Vicente Redwoods now sits. They learned that once cut, redwoods will then sprout into eight or ten new trees, meaning that tree-cutting promoted the growth of the forest. “They were able to pick and choose what trees to thin and realized that thinning worked really well in that redwood forest,” McCrary Webb, now president of Big Creek, explains.

“I really came around to embracing
active management as a way to steward
forests,” says Hamey.

When outside timber operators arrived to clear-cut the forest, the family lobbied alongside advocates for Forest Practice Rules, a set of regulations governed by the California Board of Forestry and Fire Protection, in the Santa Cruz Mountains in the ’70s. The rules outlawed clear-cutting in the region, codifying it in the state’s Forest Practice Rules. Ever since, the only tree-cutting allowed has been “single tree selection.” This means foresters can’t create a gap in the forest larger than half an acre or remove a tree that’s not within 75 feet of another healthy and industrious leafy conifer, like a redwood. The goal, essentially, is to maintain a standing, thriving forest, whether it is managed as a working forest—one steadily supplying wood and other natural resources—or a mostly untouched forest preserve. The rules enabled small companies like Big Creek to remain in business.

Hamey calls her more than 10 years of past work for Big Creek Lumber, and her brief stints at other forestry companies, valuable learning experiences. Applying different silvicultural—forest science and management—practices could achieve wildly varying effects on a forest, nudging the direction of its growth and evolution. She also realized that in areas where the ecosystem was intact and healthy, it made sense to preserve land as wilderness, but when it came to more damaged woodland ecosystems, certain tree-cutting techniques could also return the forest to health. “I really came around to embracing active management as a way to steward forests,” she says.

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➌

➍

➎

➊ To help restore heavily burned areas in San Vicente Redwoods (SVR), dead trees are logged and turned into biochar, a soil supplement. ➋ The thick, post-fire understory of SVR’s Deadman Gulch slows restoration efforts in 2024. Note the worker’s orange helmet in the background. ➌ Sempervirens Fund executive director, Sara Barth, visits Big Basin State Park after the CZU fire in 2020. ➍ Smaller trees with pink ribbons will be cut down in SVR’s restoration reserve to spur growth in a larger, older tree. ➎ SVR in 2016.

Buds in a redwood trunk sprout after fire, creating the green fuzzy “sweater” look seen in San Vicente Redwoods in 2022.

The post Why Cut Redwoods? appeared first on Sempervirens Fund.

photo by Orenda Randuch

The Benefits of Old-Growth

Seeing an ancient coast redwood in person is awesome. Capable of reaching heights more than three hundred feet tall–taller than the Statue of Liberty–redwoods are providing both habitat and unparalleled carbon storage every inch of the way. As redwoods grow older, typically about 150 years old in ideal habitat conditions, they not only grow taller, they also grow wider, thicker, and reiterate their trunks–creating lots of space for Co2 on the inside and space for wildlife and plants on the outside.

As they age, redwoods also become more resilient: better able to protect themselves and support the forest. Their thick, armor-like bark can grow to be a foot thick–helping to protect them from fire, pests, and rot. Old-growth canopies are higher and harder for fire to reach. Their well-established root systems spread 100-feet wide and interconnect with fungi and other trees throughout the forest to share nutrients and information. Old-growth redwoods are able to help support the forest as a whole, and with their ancient lifespans they are able to live for millennia. Read more facts about Redwoods.

Old-growth redwoods are not only crucial for forest health, they are crucial for the fight against climate change and species’ survival.

photo by Orenda Randuch

The Changing Forest

Redwoods’ size and resilience also made them incredibly desirable as building materials. The redwoods in the Santa Cruz Mountains were being clear cut to build, and rebuild when disasters like the 1906 earthquake struck, the growing communities around them. While your fellow supporters formed Sempervirens Fund in 1900 to protect the remaining redwood forests, many forests were already reduced to stumps. Only 5% or less old-growth redwoods are estimated to remain throughout their entire range today. While redwoods are incredibly resilient and capable of resprouting, entire forests were growing back at the same time which created forests that were too close together to grow as large as they once were and without many of the benefits of old-growth to help support them.

Redwoods at Big Basin show resilience 5 years after CZU Fire, story by CBS News Bay Area

Today, clear cut logging is not allowed in the Santa Cruz Mountains. But the forests, struggling to grow back in tight quarters without the assistance of their elders, face the additional challenges of increased droughts, high temperatures, and fire. When the 2020 CZU Fire ignited across the Santa Cruz Mountains, forests were already at a disadvantage–close together, hot, and dry. The unprecedented fire tore through 86,000 acres including nearly every protected acre Sempervirens Fund cares for. While most of the redwoods are expected to recover from the fire, the urgency to make forests as resilient as possible for the increasingly extreme and unpredictable effects of climate change ahead was starkly underscored.

Fortunately, Sempervirens Fund had decades of experience resetting redwood forests from past damage utilizing a forest management approach called Restoration Forestry. Active restoration forestry techniques had helped redwood forests recuperate more quickly and they could help establish healthy forest conditions like old-growth redwoods in decades rather than centuries

Restoration Forestry

Restoration forestry can help reset forest health and resilience so forests can provide fresh air, clean water, habitat, and carbon storage. Despite being backed by both cutting-edge science and traditional Indigenous practices, the methods can seem antithetical to their goals at first–after all, wasn't it cutting and fire that got the forest into this state in the first place?–but armed with research, humility, and observation, the results are becoming clearer and reinforce the need for our active management of forests.

When Sempervirens Fund protected a former tree farm in 2008, once known as Sempervirens 236, it was clear the forest near Boulder Creek would need more restoration forestry than any property we had protected before, in order to help return the industrial rows of trees back into a healthy, diverse, resilient forest. With the guidance of professionals like Forester Nadia Hamey, a plan was put in place to reduce competition and potential fuel for a fire, and increase the growth of larger redwoods, known as old-growth recruitment, and improve the forest’s resilience to challenges like fires and droughts. By 2019, we were already seeing an increase in biodiversity on the forest floor–a sign the forest can support more species. In 2023, Sempervirens 236’s redwood forests, now healthy and thriving, were added to Castle Rock State Park.

While a redwood forest might be able to restore itself given centuries and ideal conditions, the threats of climate change are unpredictable and urgent. Through restoration forestry techniques, forests like those at Sempervirens 236 can recover from the past and be resilient for the future more quickly.

photo by Rebecca Thomas

Forestry Techniques

The Living Laboratory

Restoration Forestry techniques like these are now helping the largest private forest remaining in the Santa Cruz Mountains recover from a history of logging, mining, and the severe 2020 CZU Fire, and regain resiliency as quickly as possible so the forest can both survive and help fight climate change. In the forests of San Vicente Redwoods that humans have exploited for nearly a century, we’re attempting to strike a careful balance of human involvement.

photo by Orenda Randuch

“Restoration at scale was always going to be tricky,” says Sempervirens Fund’s Executive Director Sara Barth. San Vicente Redwoods is a living laboratory where we seek to enhance its health by applying insights from academic research, other conservation organizations (including Peninsula Open Space Trust, Save the Redwoods League, and Land Trust Santa Cruz County), and the restoration forestry practices that helped reset Sempervirens 236 on a healthy trajectory for recovery. “Having a restoration and working forest in tandem has taught us a lot about not only supporting the forest’s long-term health but also how to prepare for and respond to wildfire.”

Protected in 2011, San Vicente Redwoods vast 8,532 acres include different plant communities, topographies, and different needs for recovery. Forester Nadia Hamey helped to prioritize the needs of the forest into different sections: Preservation - where the forest needs maintenance to stay healthy; Restoration - where the forest benefits from strategic thinning so trees can grow larger; and Working Forest - where the Old-Growth Recruitment helps redwoods gain much needed old-growth characteristics more quickly.

Any trees that are strategically cut for the forest’s health further benefit the forest by being utilized for habitat on the forest floor or in creeks, processed into biomass to return nutrients to the soil without the risk of becoming fuel for fire, or sold as lumber and reinvested into further work to restore San Vicente Redwoods.

Experts Dig into the Controversy

Restoration forestry and relying on sustainable logging to help fund conservation of San Vicente Redwoods has been controversial and it remains complicated today, even for its advocates. That includes Hamey. Logging can be done well or poorly, just like many other resource management objectives. When done well, it provides a sustainable source of wood with little long-term impact to the forest ecosystem,” she said. “We can use the revenue from timber harvesting to help achieve other land management objectives, like weed control, road maintenance, fuel reduction, large woody debris installation, etc.”

Dan Sicular, a California environmental planning consultant with 35 years of experience, believes that selling the logs harvested through thinning can help to fund forest restoration work, though he knows this view is controversial. His view acknowledges the reality of the outsized role of the timber economy in the West today; California’s forest industry contributes $39 billion to the state’s economy. With logging companies owning some of the largest tracts of land in the Santa Cruz Mountains, “I see some conservation benefit from having an active logging industry,” Sicular argued, especially when the alternative is for the companies to subdivide the parcels and sell them off, fragmenting crucial habitats. Also, since the logging companies don’t want their investments to burn up, they have a strong incentive to manage their land to prevent and control wildfire.

video by Jordan Plotsky

Tim Hyland, an environmental scientist for California State Parks, argues that in the Santa Cruz Mountains, the problem today is that there are too many trees, since forest managers stopped using fire to thin their ranks, especially fire-sensitive species like the Douglas fir. “So much damage to these ecosystems has happened in the last 100 to 200 years that it’s very easy for people to feel like, ‘please don’t touch it and it'll be fine.’”

Hyland acknowledged that, left alone for hundreds of years, the forest might eventually recover its state prior to Euro-American settlement, with one large tree out-competing the others to create a forest of giant redwoods that are widely-spaced from one another. But in a warming, drying climate, the smaller trees now crowding the understory are more susceptible to catastrophic, high-severity fires that leave significant damage. “A whole bunch of little sticks burn a lot better than one great big stick,” he explained. And since California forest managers have kept fire largely at bay for over a century, “lighting a fire in them is like playing with matches in a dynamite factory,” he said. “The fuels have built up to a point where it's extremely challenging to introduce fire in a safe way.” In this scenario, mechanical thinning of the smaller trees—cutting them, in other words—is a necessary safety measure before conducting prescribed burns.

video by Jordan Plotsky

Even while acknowledging that some trees must be cut down, Hyland remains skeptical. Felling the trees and dragging them out of the forest kicks up dust, disturbs the environment, and risks introducing invasive plants through the heavy equipment. “My primary problem with it is that humans are at the helm,” he said, “and if the decisions are influenced by financial considerations, then they're not primarily influenced by what the land needs.”

At San Vicente Redwoods, restoration forestry has been practiced with a lot of humility, evaluation, and a willingness to adjust if tactics aren’t working. Results of work done before the CZU Fire are incredibly encouraging and provide insight into where and how restoration forestry can help the forest recover from that fire and help protect it and nearby communities for the next fire.

Results for Redwoods

In February 2020–just a few months before thousands of lightning strikes ignited the CZU Fire in August 2020, crucial restoration forestry work took place that both helped protect the forest and nearby communities. Thirty acres in San Vicente Redwoods’ Restoration Reserve forest section were treated using prescribed and cultural burns, and more than 15 miles of shaded fuel breaks were created. The areas with prescribed burns appear to have weathered the blaze much better than the adjacent untreated parts of the forest. And the shaded fuel break helped fire crews stop the fire from spreading to a nearby community.

A photo of blackened tree trunks with healthy green canopies intact above was treated with a shaded fuel break prior to the CZU Fire and burned less severely. A photo of mostly standing dead trees with only a handful of trees bearing green regrowth and much more dense understory growth along the ground was not treated with a shaded fuel break prior to the CZU Fire and burned more severely. Photos taken in 2023 by Ian Bornarth.

“We’re seeing results that indicate restoration forestry are these redwood forests' best chance of recovering from past damage and both surviving and fighting climate change,” said Barth. Restoration Forestry is a key component to Sempervirens Fund’s Climate Action Plan, a plan to accelerate the protection and resilience of redwoods by 2030.

The post Growing Old-Growth appeared first on Sempervirens Fund.

photo by Kim Nelson and Dan Cushing

Rare in the Redwoods

It’s extraordinary to see a marbled murrelet in the redwoods. But the reason may surprise you. Despite being an endangered species and in the Santa Cruz mountains facing some of the largest habitat impacts, it isn’t their scarcity that makes the encounter so rare.

For being described as a potato with wings, the endangered seabird is shockingly fast–up to 100 miles per hour–and elusive. In fact, when training to monitor for marbled murrelets in the wee hours of the morning when the birds are most active in the forest, Sempervirens Fund’s Natural Resource Manager Beatrix Jiménez-Helsley says monitors are not supposed to sit or even lean on anything so they can be most alert for any potential sounds of wing beats or calls because the birds themselves are usually too fast and too well-camouflaged to be seen.

So how can we monitor for the presence of these endangered and secretive birds to protect and support the habitat they need?

Monitoring Marbled Murrelets

Considering how difficult marbled murrelets are to see in the redwood forest, Beatrix and Alex designed a survey to monitor marbled murrelets utilizing two different approaches to gather information.

First, acoustic recording units (ARUs) would be placed along strategically selected flyways—rivers and creeks murrelets follow from the sea—in the forest. The ARUs can be set to record sounds around sunrise and sunset when marbled murrelets are most active in the forest. The recordings can help confirm if marbled murrelets were at a location and narrow down the most promising spots for more in-depth monitoring.

Second, Alex will visit each site once a month throughout nesting season, standing for several hours through sunrises and sunsets hoping to catch a potato-like glimpse below the canopy or hear a boomerang—like whoosh of a wingbeat indicating a nest is nearby. As Beatrix explains, a marbled murrelet flying below the canopy is more exposed to predators, so something has to be worth taking the risk—like caring for offspring.

Beatrix Jiménez-Helsley (left) and Alex Rinkert (right) survey the forest for ideal marbled murrelet monitoring locations, by Orenda Randuch.

Approaches to Monitoring Mysterious Marbled Murrelets

Acoustic Recording Units (ARUs)

What: records audio
When: scheduled around sunrise and sunset, April-August
Where: 5 “suitable habitat” locations
How: software can parse likely “keer” call and wingbeat detections for researchers

In-Person Monitoring

What: watches and listens
When: once a month, near sunrise and sunset, April-August
Where: 5 “suitable habitat” locations
How: can verify nesting behavior and possibly location

photos by Orenda Randuch

The team appears miniscule compared to the fluffy basal sprouting of the large redwood trees above that offer suitable nesting habitat for endangered marbled murrelets, by Orenda Randuch.

photo by Orenda Randuch

Struggling in the Santa Cruz Mountains

Like the redwood forests they rely on for their reproduction, this is the southernmost end of marbled murrelets' range where they face the brunt of climate change effects like warming temperatures, droughts, and increasingly severe and frequent fires. In 2020 alone, it was estimated that 50% of marbled murrelet’s suitable habitat in the region was lost due to the CZU Fire.

Compounding the challenges, depending on two different types of habitat—ocean and forest—means marbled murrelets are threatened by climate impacts on both fronts. The Santa Cruz mountains marbled murrelets are also close to major metropolitan areas and farther from federal forest lands and the protections that come with them. But Portia, Laird, Alex, and Beatrix actively participate in a collaborative marbled murrelet research network striving to pool data and resources across agencies and landowners in this especially challenging southernmost habitat region in the Santa Cruz mountains, officially called Zone 6 by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

As stewards of several thousands acres of protected redwood forests and lands in the Santa Cruz mountains, Sempervirens Fund actively monitors for marbled murrelets in suitable habitat areas. Last year, marbled murrelets were detected at 3 out of 5 monitoring locations which was encouraging after concerns nesting habitat loss from the 2020 CZU Fire could be a potential final blow to the struggling species in Zone 6.

We hope more encouraging findings will result from this year’s marbled murrelet monitoring.

What's Next

Hundreds of hours of audio recordings from the ARUs are being parsed with software by Conservation Metrics Inc. to help narrow down sounds specific to marbled murrelets like their signature “keer” call and their wingbeats. Alex says this data can be used to verify his in-person monitoring findings and provide daily comparisons for his monthly visual findings. Once the analysis is finalized, Alex and Beatrix will share their results with Portia, Laird, and the rest of the Zone 6 marbled murrelet monitoring network to help inform our regional understanding of how the sensitive and secretive species is faring at the end of its range.

Stay tuned for the monitoring results in Part 2 of this story. In the meantime, learn how you can help support struggling endangered marbled murrelets in the Santa Cruz mountains.

A spectogram of a marbled murrelet call from an ARU, by Conservation Metrics International

How You Can Help

While we may not all be able to stand alert for hours monitoring for speeding potatoes in waning light, we can all play a part in protecting this endangered seabird in the redwood forest.

1. Know Your Marbled Murrelet

If you think you see a marbled murrelet, please notify a park official so they can confirm and follow the appropriate procedure.

Learn More

2. Be Crumb Clean

Marbled murrelet eggs can fall prey to corvids like jays, ravens, and crows, which tend to follow human presence in hopes of crumbs. Watch a video to learn how to be crumb clean and help prepare your parks for nesting.

Watch the Video

3. Support Stewardship

This marbled murrelet monitoring work was made possible by a grant from the Arthur L. & Elaine V. Johnson Foundation. You can support more stewardship work like this to monitor, restore, and care for the redwood forest and its species by making a donation.

Donate Now

The post Close Encounter: Monitoring Marbled Murrelets appeared first on Sempervirens Fund.

photo by Ian Bornarth.

There and Back Again

Marcella, one of two women in the Amah Mutsun Land Trust’s Native Stewardship Corps during her tenure, spent four years of her weekends driving between her home in Las Vegas to practically turn around and travel back to the Santa Cruz mountains for the work week. Marcella would arrive every Monday with intention: to “restore the landscape and relearn the purposes and tending of the plants.” “It’s mainly fieldwork that varies day-to-day and week-to-week. I like that,’ she said.

“I’m connecting with family and culture.”

photo by Ian Bornarth

Consequences of Separation

Historic accounts of California by early Europeans paint a picture of its thriving natural bounty^{see footnote number 1}. A large village site of “first contact” with Indigenous Peoples in the region, described during the Portolá Expedition, the first recorded European land entry into California, is thought to be Quiroste Valley in the Santa Cruz mountains region^{see footnote number 2}–a region once home to 20 politically distinct peoples^{see footnote number 3}. But the ensuing Spanish missions systemically began the forced removal of Indigenous Peoples from their lands to be integrated into missions and converted into what they intended to be god-fearing agrarian workers. This tragic separation from the land and culture has been profound. Today, the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band trace their ancestry to those who survived the brutal missions of Santa Cruz and San Juan Bautista. And with their ancestors’ removal went eons of knowledge of and experience with the land, flora, and fauna.

map from Amah Mutsun Land Trust

The flourishing plants and wildlife described in historic accounts of California were not a sign of untapped, limitless resources but rather largely the result of finely tuned stewardship practices of Indigenous Peoples^{see footnote number 1}. In many ways, we are still uncovering and re-establishing the sciences that reinforce traditional Indigenous knowledge and techniques. Since their removal, they have created the Amah Mutsun Land Trust as a response to tribal elders reminding them of their obligation to Creator. Their removal also played a significant role in the declining numbers of native plants and wildlife, accelerated by the overuse of natural resources, fueled by colonial and industrial strides toward “progress” and “development”. Helping Indigenous peoples regain leadership roles in conservation and revitalize their cultural connection to ancestral landscapes will help us all.

Training By Fire

Nico, a member of the Amah Mutsun Land Trust Native Stewardship Corps who lives on a reservation near Clear Lake, was the youngest Native Steward on the survey field crew. He chaperoned his brothers while they attended Amah Mutsun Land Trust’s Coastal Stewardship Summer Camp for Native Youth but he quickly became involved himself, moving into a high school internship that included fire training and hands-on experience reducing potential fire fuels in Douglas-fir forests. After graduating, Nico spent three years on the Native Stewardship Corps doing lots of work at Quiroste Valley. He always knew he wanted to work outside but, he continues to happily load music playlists on his phone for the drive down to the Santa Cruz mountains because he likes this work.

photo by Orenda Randuch

Fuels and Fire Tools

Unpredictable and unusually extreme weather may be wreaking havoc but conditions on the ground and the increased catastrophic wildfires can be traced back to the loss of Indigenous stewardship of forests. When the 2020 CZU Fire, which burned 86,000 acres in the Santa Cruz mountains, reached San Vicente Redwoods, the flames seemed to cause more damage in areas where trees had grown back too close together–the result of its logging past–or where more fuels like branches and dry brush had built up over the century or more of fire suppression.

photo by Ian Bornarth

Beginning in the late 18th century, Spanish missions barred Indigenous Peoples from utilizing small fires that can reduce fuels, support the growth of fire adapted native plants, and return nutrients to the soil–a tool they had used to care for the land and the food sources they relied on for millennia. Taking fire suppression even further, for nearly 100 years the U.S. government’s policy for all federal land management agencies was to fight all fires even those in remote wilderness areas.

photo by Mike Kahn

However, since becoming conservation land, and before the CZU fire, San Vicente Redwoods had been the site of a traditional fire ceremony performed by the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band and prescribed burns by CalFire. These and other fire management techniques combined Indigenous knowledge and the latest science. Areas of San Vicente Redwoods that had been treated with cultural and prescribed burns showed signs of burning less intensely in the CZU fire, and shaded fuel breaks–a break in vegetation to act as a speed bump for fire–were credited with aiding CalFire while they prevented the fire’s spread to nearby communities.

Despite its varying intensities, all of San Vicente Redwoods was subjected to the CZU fire in 2020. But an opportunity rose from the ashes, although it looked similar: soil. The forest understory is often covered in dense vegetation but with that cleared away by the fire and the soil exposed, culturally sensitive areas, such as Indigenous archaeological sites, can be better identified and studied for evidence of Native plant and animal use.

Family Corps

Lupe, a member of the Native Stewardship Corps since 2016, has worked with the team on countless projects across the Santa Cruz mountains and the greater traditional Amah Mutsun territory over the years. “We’re like a family, we take care of each other out here.” In 2019, Lupe met Alec Apodaca, Ph.D. candidate at the Archaeological Research Facility at U.C. Berkeley, through a project with the Native Stewardship Corps when Alec first became a consulting archaeologist with Amah Mutsun Land Trust. “Alec is a great partner,” Lupe said. Although Alec is neither a member of the tribe or the stewardship corps, he’s witnessed the dedication of the stewardship family while working with them on projects since 2016.

“We’re like a family, we take care of each other out here.”

photo by Orenda Randuch

Science and Stewardship

To expand on previous studies and visits at San Vicente Redwoods, U.C. Berkeley and the Amah Mutsun Land Trust compiled a scope of work for an integrative cultural resource survey to monitor forest health, botany, pathology, entomology, and archaeobiology in both an existing and a new study area over several years. Experienced crews of U.C. Berkeley and Amah Mutsun Land Trust’s Native Stewardship Corps would identify and measure botanical resources, fuel loads, cultural, and ecological resources across the sites over two weeks to establish a baseline. Among the field crew were several Amah Mutsun Tribal Band members working to reconnect with their ancestral lands and knowledge through the Native Stewardship Corps including Lupe from Fresno in the south, Nico from Lake County in the north, and Marcella from Las Vegas in the east. Although they all came from different points on the compass, each traveled many hours from their homes to reconnect with their ancestral home and each other.

photo by Ian Bornarth

Realities of the Work

Alec says the Native Stewardship Corps are friends and family, telling jokes, listening to music, eating good food made by Lupe, and camping together while they work on these projects. But while part of Alec’s role is to help the stewards with the cultural resource surveys, reports and studies, they have helped him to understand the realities of doing this stewardship work. “It's not easy physically or personally. Their ancestors were significantly disrupted beginning with the missions. Most of them don’t get to live in their ancestral land today. They leave their families to come do this work,” he explained.

But even after years of travel and staying in spike camps, the stewards remain committed and interested in the survey work ahead. “We get to see what the ancestors were doing, eating, and what tools they had,” Lupe said. So, they loaded up survey equipment, gear and supplies into special vehicles to get to ancestral sites–miles inland from the coast and difficult to reach even with guides–in the vastness of San Vicente Redwoods.

Cultural Landscape Research

Saucers carved out of rock by years of repeated use known as bedrock mortars mark the place that hundreds if not thousands of Indigenous Peoples sat and milled ingredients, like dried acorns, in circular motions against the bedrock with a stone pestle for food and medicine. Nearby, two large pieces of shiny, sharpened rock called Monterey chert which were often used as tools were found. Much like a modern kitchen, this Indian mortar indicates that not only tools but also a midden, where refuse from the work such as nut, shell, bone, or tool remnants, might be found with the promise of unlocking so much more information. “If we find hundreds of shells, bones, charcoal, seeds, that may indicate a food processing or habitation site,” Alec said.

photo by Ian Bornarth

The field crew dug in. They started by collecting surface soil samples, two liters at a time, tagging the sample location with a high precision GPS unit, and sifting the soil through wood framed screens in search of pieces of limpet and turban snail shells and other things obscured in the dirt. After counting, weighing, and identifying, the crews carefully return the materials right back to the sample location. This “catch-and-release” is a fundamental part of Amah Mutsun Land Trust’s approach to survey. Catch and release allows for archaeological preservation by documenting the object in place and returning it to where it was found gathers the information needed in a low impact way respecting the object’s place in history and in the environment. Even the dirt itself is a clue, Alec said, as soil in a midden area would be darker and greasier as a result of cooking the food and its residual organic content.

In most cultural resource studies today, archaeological assessment usually takes place independently from biological surveys, and perhaps even by different work crews. From the perspective of Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, vegetation and wildlife in which they maintained close relationships with for countless generations also constitute cultural resources, containing similar aspects of significance that, say, an archaeological site may have. In other words, from this view there is no division between cultural and natural resources, and they should be studied comprehensively using Tribal perspectives.

While the crews systematically scour the landscape for the presence of archaeology, they also document ethnobotanical resources and vegetation, even abiotic resources, such as viewsheds, rock outcroppings, and natural spring sources whenever they are encountered. These types of baseline efforts to identify and document cultural resources also allows Amah Mutsun Tribe members space to re-access and re-engage with cultural landscapes for the first time in several generations since colonization and forced removal from their ancestral areas. Centering Indigenous perspectives and participation towards the documentation of cultural landscapes is what makes Amah Mutsun Land Trust’s approach to cultural resource studies a more holistic effort and a nexus for making decisions regarding the revitalization of ancestral lands and cultural practices.

Planting Sites and Signs of Respect

While plant remnants unearthed in the soil could provide valuable information about Indigenous foodways and subsistence, certain information could be gleaned from plants still growing in the earth as well. As part of the vegetative mapping survey, visual assessments looked to identify dominant trees in different areas as well as look for culturally significant plants, important to Indigenous Peoples, growing near one another that may indicate relict patches from Indigenous tending in the past. Relict patches sometimes look unusual in their growth, composition, and location and Alec says can be associated with other significant cultural resources like archaeological sites or springs. Although San Vicente Redwoods burned in 2020, many native plants are adapted to California’s natural wildfire cycle–which is one reason fire was such a useful Indigenous stewardship technique–so, some native plants are not only adapted to regrow following a fire but can also help to indicate the potential presence of a cultural site.

photo by Ian Bornarth

Among the profuse regrowth of native, fire-adapted plants capitalizing on the glittering, bare soil and extra space and sunshine at San Vicente Redwoods left behind by the 2020 CZU fire were bright field poppies, purple lupine, and several foot tall Yerba Santa–an important medicinal plant used to treat an impressive array of symptoms. Amidst the freshly sprung jungle jockeying for sunlight, the field crew found plants used for fishing including wild cucumber which was used as a fish poison and wild irises which were used to make “100 year” fishing nets. The nets required so many irises they were managed in beds and the nets would be passed down to following generations.

Several plants providing important food sources like California blackberry, Indian lettuce (sometimes referred to as miner’s leaf lettuce), and Indian potatoes were found as well. Indian potatoes are the corms of wildflowers commonly called blue dicks but as Marcella pointed out using the Mutsun names for the native plants and animals they cared for long before today’s common names for them were given is a small act of respect. “It's breathing some life back into it and strengthening the relationship with the plant. Language revitalization is a big part of Amah Mutsun Land Trust’s mission,” Alec related. Their relationship with culturally important plants, played a role in finding another culturally important site.

wild iris

California blackberry

Indian lettuce

Indian potatoes

photos by Ian Bornarth

Eco-Archaeology

A small, flat grassland meadow lined by oak trees, whose acorns were an Indigenous food staple, hinted at another potential cultural site. Scans from Ground Penetrating Radar confirmed and helped map strategic excavation grids for potential artifact rich features, like earth ovens. The field crew, flags in hand, walked side by side an arm’s length apart flagging promising looking finds on the surface. Thanks to the help of tunneling gophers, referred to as bioturbation, pieces of shell, chert, and groundstones–cylindrical rocks like a rolling pin–that would have otherwise likely been a ways underground were visible right on the surface. Lupe, an experienced excavator, was not surprised. “You never know what you’ll find near a gopher hole,” he laughed.

The excavation plots were selected by areas with the most flagged items. Lupe and Nico, a first-time excavator, gently peeled back the grass and outlined their 1/2 meter by 1 meter plots, and removed 10 cm soil samples a layer at a time. Some artifacts and biofacts were large enough to be discovered in the layers of the excavation plot including the exciting finds of two large rock scallop shells, a faunal rib fragment with marks in straight lines indicating the work of butchering with a tool rather than the puncture wounds of a predator’s teeth, and projectile point fragments made of local Monterey chert – including a point made of an exotic obsidian source. “We can test the geochemical fingerprint of obsidian artifacts and pinpoint their location to faraway places in California, or further” Alec noted.

The buckets of the remaining soil samples are then sifted on the ⅛ inch screens where Marcella and other crew members expertly pick out tiny–approximately 0.3 mm in size– bits of shell, bone, and chert. Interestingly, miles away from where they would naturally be found, they collected many pieces of shellfish, abalone, sea urchin, crabs, anchovies, seaweed limpets and obsidian.

photo by Orenda Randuch

photo by Orenda Randuch

Remarkable Remnants

One of Marcella’s favorite finds from the screen was a piece of worked chert with visible waves in its fracture lines–evidence of the force of hitting another rock while it was being shaped and sharpened. Chert was the locally sourced glassy, marine sedimentary rock from the area we know as Año Nuevo State Park today. The area’s premiere cutting tool, chert was used for tools that needed to be sharp such as knives and projectile points, like the one discovered here, for hunting tools. Just as the style of clothes can help to identify the place and period they are from, once the form of the artifact can be confirmed, Alec says the projectile point can help provide a relative chronological date of the site, like bell bottom pants in the 70s.

Unlike the tool and projectile point made of chert from Año Nuevo, obsidian doesn’t form in the volcano-less Santa Cruz mountains. So, the small pieces of rock the field crew found that may have been obsidian were particularly exciting to Nico. “It would mean it had been traded,” Nico said. And if it is indeed obsidian, Alec says x-ray fluorescence can reveal its geochemical fingerprint and match it to a known source in California. “It could help piece together broader trade routes and how this site fits into regional trade across the broader San Francisco Bay Area,” he explained.

Another unexpected find from afar was the sheer amount and diversity of shells. Nico was surprised by the number of shells found at the site because of the work it would have taken to carry them so far from the ocean. Small limpets may have hitched a ride on seaweed harvested to wrap food–keeping it cool and moist like a modern-day cooler–but the large, dense rock scallop shells found at the site? Surely, their weight wouldn’t have been born all these miles up rugged terrain without notice. Alec said they haven’t been found at other sites in the area. Furthermore, purple hinge rock scallops could live in the lower tidal zone, meaning someone may have to dive to get them, he elaborated.

Finding fewer animal bones and nuts than they did shellfish remnants so far inland was certainly unforeseen. However, plant matter which would have been much lighter to transport but wouldn’t be as easy to find in the soil today, due to their more fragile composition, may be discovered from the soil samples and provide much more information about culturally important plants.

photo by Orenda Randuch

grindstone

chert

projectile point

fragments

abalone shell

rock scallop

faunal bone

photos by Orenda Randuch

Learning in the Lab

Was this a seasonal site? Alec says his early speculation is that this site may have been a seasonal village used during cooler seasons as a satellite of a larger village, like Quiroste, where tribes would gather. The amount of shells found certainly supports a large amount of food being sourced along the coast and processed here. Although much more evidence may come out in the wash–literally–through floating the soil samples to find evidence of fish and examining soil for remnants of acorns and hazelnuts can further piece together the food sources and time of year people were processing food here.

Float Samples

An emerging archaeobiology technique in California is soil flotation and the analysis of microecofacts–very small biological artifacts unaltered by humans–like fish scales and seeds that might not be found through other means can float right to the top. Then, the buoyant sample of microecofacts will be examined through a microscope for insights into the traditional food sources of the Amah Mutsun’s ancestors and, through isotopic studies on shellfish samples, which can determine when the shellfish were harvested from the ocean possibly even help to narrow down whether the site was used year-round or seasonally.

Phytolith Analysis

A tiny key into the past, grasses can unlock details of the use of fire in Indigenous stewardship in these grassland prairies. Grasses produce abundant amounts of identifiable phytoliths, minute silica particles formed in plants that can persist in soils for centuries. Measuring the densities of these grassland phytoliths from samples taken across the landscape can help paint a picture of ancient biotic patterns of vegetation around the site.

With so much to cover in the field, lab work will be key in finding even more than meets the eye. U.C. Berkeley’s access to labs, equipment, and students enables this very intensive, and hopefully enlightening, work.

photo by Orenda Randuch

What’s Next

Lab work including soil flotation, sorting specimens and other analysis is underway at U. C. Berkeley, but the thorough and comprehensive projects will likely continue through 2023. While we await revelations the surveys may provide about Indigenous stewardship of the past, what lessons do the field crew hope can be brought to San Vicente Redwoods’ stewardship in the future?

Marcella hopes fuel reduction projects will continue to prevent soil damage–because if a catastrophic fire becomes intense enough, the soil’s nutrients and microbes that feed the forest can be destroyed. Prescribed burns are a helpful tool for fuel reduction projects to reduce dry brush, branches and vegetation on the ground that can feed a fire allowing it to burn more intensely, spread faster, and even climb higher into tree canopies. And as Nico added, cultural burns–smaller fires, ceremonial in prayer, can be used to steward native plants important both culturally for food, medicine, and raw materials, as well as for wildlife.

photo by Ian Bornarth

Cultural burning was so intrinsic to Indigenous culture that agriculture may not have been needed because the relationship with cultural burning was so productive, but this is a concept that is still debated, Alec said. He noted the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band would like to reestablish cultural burning to revitalize the landscape. “But how and where do you start?”, Alec asked. “It’s hard to retrace the locations of the landscape where burns took place, the burns were possibly so light on the land that they may not have even left scars on certain trees for us to look at centuries later,” he continued. “Looking at the multiple records of evidence of how it was done can help make these really big decisions.”

Alec hopes the research can guide stewardship, that we can take lessons from the past to help us try to undo some of the changes in the land over the last 200 years. But he also pointed out the research itself can provide a pathway forward for Indigenous stewardship. “It not only provides opportunity for Indigenous participation, so they can have a say in how to treat discoveries, and reconnect with their culture and ancestral land, but it also provides valuable experience to become leaders in the field science where their Tribal perspectives have been sorely missed.”

The post Indigenous Stewardship at San Vicente Redwoods: Past, Present, and Future appeared first on Sempervirens Fund.

Contact: Matt Shaffer, Sempervirens Fund, 415-609-2750, mshaffer@sempervirens.org
Note to media: Images and maps of San Vicente Redwoods are available for download here.

Redwood and mixed fir seedlings were planted across burned areas of San Vicente Redwoods. Photo: Matt Dolkas/POST.

DAVENPORT, Calif. (Sept. 13, 2023) – Leaders from the Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST) and Sempervirens Fund, who co-own and manage the 8,852 acres of San Vicente Redwoods (SVR), gathered last month with their partners Save the Redwoods League and Land Trust of Santa Cruz County to review their joint progress in advancing restoration of the property that burned completely in the CZU Lightning Complex wildfire of 2020. Their work has aimed both to restore the health of a forest that was heavily logged at the beginning of the 20th century, as well as to build wildfire resilience back into the regional landscape as part of CAL FIRE’s Community Wildfire Protection Plan for San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties. The partners’ work on the property has also aimed to benefit adjacent communities through infrastructure improvements and safety measures.

Since early 2022 – 12 years into their unique co-management of this property ‒ the SVR partners have treated more than 820 forested acres, roughly 10% of the property, using a variety of forest restoration techniques including removal of hazard trees along critical infrastructure (like roads and powerlines) and restoration thinning to encourage maturation of redwoods. The partners tended thousands of redwood and mixed fir seedlings planted last year across 270 acres of San Vicente Redwoods to accelerate the regrowth of the forest that burned in the CZU wildfire. Crews also cleared 5.7 miles of roads that had been blocked by aggressive post-CZU understory plant growth, restoring management access to the Coast-Cotoni Ridge.

Crews at SVR are creating nine miles of shaded fuel breaks along Warrenella Road that will help to slow future wildfires and protect nearby communities such as Davenport and Bonny Doon. Warrenella Road runs along a key ridgeline and was used by CAL FIRE to slow the 2009 Lockheed Fire. A total of 8,000 tons of biomass were removed from the forest in related efforts led by the Bonny Doon Fire Safe Council. All were incinerated on-site utilizing air curtain burners provided by CAL FIRE, which significantly reduce the release of both airborne pollutants and sparks ‒ and the risk each carries.

Redwood and mixed fir seedlings were planted across burned areas of San Vicente Redwoods. Photo: Matt Dolkas/POST.

The 2022-23 winter storm season brought an exceptional 75.15 inches of rain and multiple bomb cyclones through the property. Nevertheless, the team ensured that improvements to nine creek crossings on Cal Poly Road held up. These improvements reduced sedimentation along three miles of the environmentally sensitive Scott Creek watershed. Additionally, the driving surface of a bridge over San Vicente Creek, heavily damaged in the CZU fire, was repaired with redwood cut during fuels management efforts and milled on the property.

As a “living laboratory” for forest restoration and natural resource management, SVR hosts 24 researchers from 11 institutions, who are engaged in ongoing studies about the region’s sensitive resources, long-term impacts of and recovery from the CZU fire and the efficacy of restoration techniques. A botanical study revealed nine special status species and four locally rare species across 23 biological hotspots at SVR. These findings will help SVR partners target future restoration activities, like invasive plant management and ecologically focused prescribed burns. With support from the Amah Mutsun Land Trust’s Native Stewards, University of California Santa Cruz and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration researchers also confirmed the presence of rare coho salmon further into the property than ever noted before, swimming through a stream that was reopened to the ocean after a 2021 dam removal.

“Our work at San Vicente Redwoods is driven by both conservation and community-serving goals,” said Walter T. Moore, president of POST. “As we’re able to build wildfire resilience back into the landscape, we’re providing meaningful protections for local communities as well as the greater Santa Cruz Mountains ecosystem.”

SVR partners performed repairs on storm-impacted roads to ensure that Davenport Sanitation District can access critical water infrastructure to support their customers. The partners also installed six new water tanks at three locations on the property to support emergency fire suppression for the region and maintenance operations on the property.

Additionally, the partners have engaged local partners and civic organizations in numerous ways, including hosting trainings for the Sheriff’s search and rescue crews; CAL FIRE chainsaw-use training and certification classes; and hose-laying training for the Bonny Doon volunteer fire-fighting team.

“Despite the CZU fire, San Vicente Redwoods is a case study in the promise of active, science-centered stewardship,” added Sara Barth, executive director of Sempervirens Fund. “We are succeeding, and it would not be possible without our ongoing partnerships, including with CAL FIRE, the Amah Mutsun Land Trust and the many state and regional agencies who are actively supporting and participating in the work.”

The partners built and opened 7.3 miles of hiking, biking and equestrian trails in December 2022, the first of several phases envisioned for the property. To date, more than 5,000 people have registered for a free lifetime pass issued by the Land Trust of Santa Cruz County to use the trails at San Vicente Redwoods.

The many types of work happening at SVR are both important and costly. In the past year, the partners and their property manager have secured $3 million in new grants and project-specific donations to ensure that the project continues uninterrupted. The funding sources include CAL FIRE, California Coastal Conservancy, Regional Water Quality Control Board, U.S. Natural Resource Conservation Service, Board of Forestry and numerous private and individual donors.

What’s Next at San Vicente Redwoods
In addition to continuing to create shaded fuel breaks and reduce fuels across the property, the partners are preparing for a conservation-focused commercial redwood timber harvest on 205 acres of the working forest section of the property. This innovative timber harvest is aimed at helping the forest recover from the CZU Fire by removing the smallest trees which were most impacted by the fire. By removing these severely damaged smaller redwoods, the remaining larger, healthier redwoods will have more space to thrive and recover from the fire damage. Partners expect these trees will continue to grow around damaged tissues, sequestering more carbon and creating crevices in the bark used by bats and other wildlife.

“Our conservation approach to harvesting is innovative and experimental compared to common practice, where we’re taking out the smallest trees rather than the larger ones,” explained Susan Petrie, senior stewardship project manager at POST. Any revenue generated by the harvest will go back into funding the ongoing restoration work at SVR.

Petrie added, “Even the harvest is part of our living laboratory approach at San Vicente Redwoods. Thanks to a Board of Forestry grant, we are tracking individual fire-damaged trees through the milling process to understand how external fire damage corresponds to internal wood condition. This knowledge will help foresters make more informed decisions about post-fire recovery and tree selection in the future throughout the redwood range.”

The post NEWS: San Vicente Redwoods Progress Report on Wildfire Resilience Restoration Three Years After CZU Wildfire, Amid Continued Risk appeared first on Sempervirens Fund.

Tree trunks like matchsticks rise up to surviving and recovering green canopy above the charred marks left by the flames against a bright blue sky at San Vicente Redwoods three years after the CZU Fire

But while many parts of the forest were devastated by the CZU Fire, most of the redwoods will recover, largely because efforts to prepare it for–and with–fire still resulted in better protections for nearby communities and the forest. Shaded fuel breaks created in previous years ​​in partnership with CalFire and the Bonny Doon Fire Safe Council reduced dry brush and understory vegetation that can speed a fire along. These fuel breaks likely decreased the heat and speed of the fire at San Vicente Redwoods as it neared neighborhoods close by.

A photo from 2020 after the CZU Fire could almost be mistaken for a display of autumn colors but few leaves or debris are on the forest floor. A photo in 2023 shows more green canopy above lush, dense green understory growth several feet high on both sides of the road

Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Fire Resilience

Rays of sunlight shine through four bright green leaves of a plant rising from the forest floor taking advantage of resources from prescribed burn at San Vicente Redwoods in 2017

Prescribed Burns

Prescribed burns are one of the most effective tools for promoting ecological resilience in the face of wildfire. Prescribed burns consume downed branches and dense understory plants to reduce the fuel available for future approaching wildfires, while also providing numerous benefits to the ecosystem.

A black-tailed deer enjoys the new plant growth and easy movement across the forest floor after a prescribed burn that left the healthy overstory untouched at San Vicente Redwoods in 2017

Strategic Thinning

Some areas are too densely overgrown, from past clear cut logging and decades of fire suppression, to feasibly utilize a prescribed burn. By strategically thinning smaller trees spaced too closely together, more space is created between trees which can slow a fire’s spread as well as allow remaining trees to grow larger and more resilient to fires ahead.

Helping to Eliminate Fuel After A Fire

A green air curtain burner from Cal Fire sits in front of dead standing trees almost as far as the eye can see at San Vicente Redwoods

Air Curtain Burner

Air curtain burners may look like unassuming shipping containers on the outside but on the inside, they're closer to fire containers. A massive fire like CZU leaves lots of fallen and hazardous–threatening to fall–trees in its burn footprint. Trees that could potentially become fuel for the next fire if left behind.

Wood that cannot be salvaged can be safely burned inside a curtain burner which consumes the wood beneath a blanket of air that constantly flows over the top—trapping heat and sparks inside—which allows it to be a safe and efficient way to reduce the abundance of fuel from the fire. Some curtain burners can also create energy from the burning process that can charge batteries or go back into the power grid. While curtain burners have been used around the state, the amount of dead trees left in CZU’s path across the Santa Cruz mountains has created novel conditions where the amount of wood not only exceeds the community and nature’s needs it poses a risk to them both necessitating some of their first use in the region.

Carbonator

Like an air curtain burner, a carbonator safely removes excess wood that could become fuel for a fire, it allows us to mimic fire conditions in multiple ways. Carbonators saves 10% of the biomass it consumes to produce “bio char” which can be used to return nutrients to the soil much as a fire would. The bio char can be repurposed for agricultural needs, providing nutrients for local organic farms.

A carbonator sits behind a large gray pile of bio char, the 10% left behind after burning off the bio mass of dead trees that can be used to return nutrients to the soil mimicking fire

“We are trying to employ tried and true fire and fuel management techniques, but we are also using innovative strategies like curtain burners and carbonators in partnership with CalFire to deal with the novel conditions post-CZU fire to tackle the huge amount of fuel build-up. Curtain burners and carbonators are technologies used around the state but not as much in our region, in that way we are trying to think differently about tackling local issues. At the same time we are helping lead regional discussions about even more innovative solutions: can our curtain burners plug into the grid and actually produce electricity? Are there opportunities for locations or facilities to process the entire region’s biomass? Can we spur more of a local market for the hardwood and biochar?”

- Ian Rowbotham

Beyond Fire: Positive Impacts of Fire Mitigation Strategies

Beyond the immediate advantages for fire prevention and recovery, wildfire mitigation efforts simultaneously help improve forest health by increasing viable habitat and carbon storage as well as improved resilience to climate change. Catastrophic wildfire is devastating to communities, but fire mitigation strategies—including returning fire to the land through cultural and prescribed burns—have the power to heal.

The post Fuel for Fire: Framing Forest Resilience Three Years After the CZU Fire appeared first on Sempervirens Fund.

Mycelium is a root-like fungal network that is often unseen but a thimble of soil is estimated to contain 400 meters of mycelia threads, photo by Kirill Ignatyev

A Note from Sempervirens Fund: Dr. Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian's essay examines the rise of the redwoods conservation movement at the same time Eugenics was gaining prominence in America. We invite you to learn along with us about these tangled movements, their roots, and the consequences we are still overcoming together today. You can also join us February 28 "Under the Redwoods" for a conversation with the author about the essay and her work in mycology.

Unsound Science

Claiming to follow from Darwin’s new theory of natural selection, and operating within the context of an already racially stratified society, eugenicists used highly-dubious pseudoscientific studies to ascribe valued traits like strength, charisma, fortitude, and intellect to white European Americans and denigrate other racial groups as subhuman. These same logics were then used to create ecological hierarchies: certain species were assigned value based on what was biggest, oldest, and considered most charismatic. For some leaders and supporters of the redwood conservation movement, the logic of eugenics was used to uplift the superiority of redwoods.

by D. Nguyen

Destruction of an Environment and the Push for Its Conservation

by Mike Kahn

To understand why eugenicists sought to conserve the redwoods, we must first turn our attention to the history that imperiled them, that of settler colonialism in the United States—one that killed and displaced the Indigenous occupants and engaged in an extractive and destructive relationship with the land. For most of the last fifteen thousand years, the coast redwood trees — Sequoia sempervirens (coast redwood) and Sequoiadendron giganteum (giant redwood)— lived alongside Indigenous peoples including the Cahto, Chimariko, Esselen, Hupa, Karuk, Lassik, Mattole, Miwok, Mutsun, Nongatl, Pomo, Rumsen, Sinkyone, Tolowa, Wailaki, Wappo, Wiyot, and Yurok-speaking peoples. During this time, redwoods and humans were members of a dynamic and enduring ecological community. The redwoods provide material resources, both directly as wood for building, and as habitat for other plants, fungi, and animals, which in turn nourished and supported the human species.

Settler Colonialism

Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute defines settler colonialism as, “a system of oppression based on genocide and colonialism, that aims to displace a population of a nation (oftentimes indigenous people) and replace it with a new settler population. Settler colonialism finds its foundations on a system of power perpetuated by settlers that represses indigenous people’s rights and cultures by erasing it and replacing it by their own."

Deep Connection

Redwoods and associated species and habitats are also imbued with deep cultural and spiritual meaning. The trees were used to create ceremonial lodges, and ceremonies would also be performed when carefully taking the tree, as needed, from the land. Many who resided in these areas centered the landscape in their creation stories and cosmologies. The landscape is not simply the stage upon which the human character plays out the story of existence; rather, the landscape is the human story and vice versa. In his essay "The Ancient Ones", Chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, Greg Sarris, writes, “The landscape was our sacred text, and we listened to what it told us. Everywhere you looked there were stories.”

Klamath Indians on the Hoopa Reservation circa 1870-1900 in boast dugout from trunks—usually either redwood or pine.

Severed Ties

The project of American settler colonialism encouraged European and later American colonists to expand the American border westward. The ever-expanding frontier was facilitated by settling the land and extracting its resources. To do so, however, settlers often displaced and came into violent confrontations with the existing Indigenous inhabitants of the land, leading to one of the largest genocidal campaigns in recorded history.

Redwood logging in the Santa Cruz mountains from our historic archive.

The reciprocal relationship between land, redwoods, and Indigenous peoples was dramatically altered following colonial westward expansion and the resultant genocide. The severing of ties between people, their nonhuman companions, and their ecological lifeways has led to generations of trauma for the relatively few who survived, as well as massive biodiversity loss — human and biodiversity plummeted in tandem. The dutiful stewards of ancient evolutionary relationships were replaced by often detached and naive extractivists looking to commodify the biology of redwoods and their affiliate species. The physical transformation of the land was tremendous—since the 1850s, 95% of the original redwood habitat has been cut at least once. What was once humming with ancient collaborations became barren, and what was not directly destroyed became stressed, dislocated, fragmented, and constantly threatened.

map by Jordan Engel, Decolonial Atlas

Birth of the Redwood Conservation Movement

The destruction of the redwood habitats was appalling to many Euro-American settlers, who rightfully recognized these habitats to be beautiful, irreplaceable, and in need of protection. The speed and scale at which redwoods (and many other habitats) were being razed catalyzed the organization of scientists and citizens in an effort to conserve them, heralding in the American conservation movement. Calls for the U.S. government to legislate preservation of certain habitats began around 1860, leading to a series of established parks and environmentally oriented groups. In 1872, Yellowstone National Park was the first established national park, a designation that protected this now famous landscape from destruction by European settlers. Founded in 1900, Sempervirens Club (now Sempervirens Fund) has since protected more than 54 square miles of redwood forest. Shortly after, in 1902, California’s first state park, Big Basin Redwoods, was established.

Sempervirens Club members orgnizing in the early 1900's, photo from the Sempervirens Fund archive

photo by Canopy Dynamics

These organizations and efforts were effective at halting redwood deforestation, raising awareness of the value of ecosystems, and contributing toward the contemporary framing of “environmentalism.” Real, tangible benefits to the earth came from these efforts, such as vast swaths of protected habitats, development of biodiversity monitoring protocols, advances in scientific research in ecology, and the return of species such as the peregrine falcon and the California condor from the brink of extinction.

However, like much of American history, a closer examination of the conservation movement reveals a more insidious dimension, one that is rarely discussed or acknowledged. In the effort of redwood conservation, a peculiar partnership was forged; for some redwood advocates, their conservation was not simply about protecting the land from destruction. Instead, as some of the world’s tallest and oldest trees, redwoods were considered the perfect symbol for the burgeoning American eugenics movement.

Eugenics and Race Science

Eugenics was a popular, widespread movement that was routinely taught in universities throughout the 19th and into the 20th century. Purportedly building off of Darwin’s new theory of natural selection, eugenicists engaged in both gene-sorting and genetic advocacy. First, they attempted to sort the world through scientific means into those species and races most fit, best adapted, and most evolved, in contrast to the maladapted, unfit, and least evolved. Second, they argued that the human gene pool could be made stronger and more evolved by eradicating its contaminating elements.

At base, however, the eugenics project was a thinly veiled attempt to use pseudo-scientific means to justify preexisting racial and class hierarchies. Using the language of genetics, eugenicists attempted to prove the biological nature of race, and tied it to racialized qualities, such as intellect, work ethic, poverty, and criminality. Eugenics ultimately sought to maintain social hierarchies, arguing for the superiority of the “Nordic race” (later expanding to include Europeans and whiteness more broadly), as well as hierarchies of ability, gender, and orientation. More specifically, its goal was to preserve certain genetic traits and behaviors that have been evaluated to be superior by European standards. This has been practiced through selective breeding (inbreeding), sterilization of groups deemed inferior, and through the construction of institutions that reinforce the dominance of particular groups over others.

Eugenics Tree image courtesy of American Philosophical Society. Eugenics poster on display at the Jewish Museum photo by Cameron Adams.

Eugenics: Purity and Prejudice

Central to eugenics is the notion of purity in genetic material or gene pools. The field was led by prominent scientists, such as Francis Galton (1822–1911), Karl Pearson (1857–1936), and the so-called “Father of Statistics,” Ronald Aylmer Fisher (1890–1962). And their political views were not marginalized, secretive, nor even arguably gray — Fisher, who served as the president of the British Genetical Society from 1940–1943, was in favor of sterilization of the “feeble minded.” Following the fall of the Third Reich, he wrote a letter appealing for the professional reintegration of the Nazi scientist Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, who himself was a student of the notorious Nazi doctor, Josef Rudolf Mengele, known as the “Angel of Death.” In his letter he writes of the Nazis, “In spite of their prejudices I have no doubt also that the Party sincerely wished to benefit the German racial stock, especially by the elimination of manifest defectives” (Weiss, 2010).

The Idea of “Wilderness”

An unnamed old-growth redwood towers above the surrounding second-growth blanket of forest in Humboldt Redwoods State Park, by Michael Nichols, National Geographic

Eugenicists did not limit their genetic classification schemes to the human species but rather expanded its philosophy into the broader natural world. What was biggest, oldest, most charismatic was considered the best, and therefore most evolved. And having already categorized white people as the most evolved specimen of their respective species, eugenicists imagined common cause in preserving other examples of evolutionary dominance—the tallest trees, the soaring eagles, the highest mountain peaks. The very idea of wilderness was born out of the eugenics-influenced American conservation movement, where the polarized values of this philosophy could be applied to the landscape. Eugenicists feared the pristine character of the white race was sullied by mixing with inferior races, and, like the redwoods, was at risk for total extinction. Galvanized by this symbology, prominent eugenicists—such as Theodore Roosevelt, Madison Grant, and Charles M. Goethe—organized groups to advocate for the redwood forests, and laid the foundation for the mainstream conservation movement in the United States (Allen, 2013).

Like the imagined purity of white genes, the chosen species and the pristine wilderness they inhabited were to be protected from the crudeness of humanity. The protection of the more homely habitats like grassland prairies or the lowly species of mushrooms have not been prioritized because they were seen as expendable.

The Impediment of Purity

In the eugenicists' worldview, there are three linked principles: 1) humans are exceptional in nature in all respects as the pinnacle of creation or evolution; 2) the white race is exceptional among all other races; 3) a thriving society is achieved and maintained by oppression of both inferior races and groups of people, and of nature. For eugenicists, societal breakdown can be explained by impurities in the gene pool, as opposed to an unequal social infrastructure, and this flawed logic applied to eugenicists' approach to conservation. Instead of correctly identifying the cause of the destruction of redwoods–settler colonialism, the genocide of Indigenous peoples and loss of their ecological knowledge, and extractive industry–American eugenicists likened the decimation of trees and the spoiling of habitat to their perceived erosion of the white race.

This purity mindset, which refuses to acknowledge the root cause of the crisis we are in, has impeded our understanding of the entangled ecological realities of our own societies and bodies as well as the ecological systems that support the human species. In addition to the enormous human cost of such racist ideologies, there have been profound costs to our biodiversity. For the eugenicists, as well as for cultures influenced by its oppressive dogma, there is a great humiliation in recognizing the shared realities and interdependencies between races and between species. In order to adequately respond to the threat facing climate, and redwoods, we must get to the roots.

Loggers in the process of cutting down a large old-growth redwood in the Santa Cruz mountains from the Sempervirens Fund historic archive.

The Roots: A Deeper Understanding of Climate Change

Geologic time scale by Frederik Lerouge.

Scholars of the humanities and the sciences introduced and popularized the term anthropocene to describe this epoch of geological and planetary affairs. Like other geological epochs—e.g., the Pleistocene, which includes the most recent glacial period—the anthropocene is describing a period of time that is characterized by specific forces or events. In this case, the root “anthro” is referring to the widespread impacts the human species has on the earth. This term is useful in emphasizing that climate change (formerly referred to as “global warming”) is the result of specific human behaviors, such as burning fossil fuels. As opposed to other geological epochs that occur without human involvement and typically over tens of thousands of years or more, many of the changes occurring within the anthropocene are detectable within a human life span. It is this tremendous compression of time that jeopardizes so much biodiversity, and thus the web of interactions that supports our own species.

Anthropocene

National Geographic defines the Anthropocene Epoch as "an unofficial unit of geologic time, used to describe the most recent period in Earth’s history when human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems."

Plunder of the Plantationocene

But some scholars have noted that the term anthropocene has the tendency to obscure critical aspects of our present situation. For it is not all humans that are the problem — it is how some humans have plundered the earth, hoarded wealth, and relied upon the eradication, displacement, or enslavement of other humans and species. Feminist philosophers Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing, among others, have instead utilized the term plantationocene, with the root word “plantation” referring to the style of agriculture first made possible through the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Through the ghastly horrors of chattel slavery, industrial farming took shape. Primarily West Africans were ripped from their ecological birthrights and deposited into wholly unfamiliar ecologies in lands cleansed of Indigenous inhabitants, and for generations they were forced to labor in the mass production of capital.

Imprinting the Earth

Industrial farming like the expansive rows of monoculture seen here, took shape from plantation style agriculture made possible through slave labor, photo by Jeremy Buckingham

This is where social and biological histories become entangled in such a way that literally imprints the earth. For the creation of plantations we see the razing of forests and decimation of grasslands at dizzying scales. We see the formation of large-scale monocultures, in which a single species is grown en masse and then stripped from their ecological birthrights. Designed for maximum profit, the enslaved laborer is forced to tend to these monocultures in daily, grueling repetitions, a task that no person could conceivably carry out absent the threat of death or torture.

The Effects of Forced Farming

by Heinrich Boll Foundation University Of Kiels Future Ocean Cluster Of Excellence, Ocean Atlas.

In these plantations, plants and animals are forced into conditions in which they did not evolve, and therefore require costly and monumental interventions to be kept alive, such as re-routing entire rivers, and massive fertilizer inputs. Enormous amounts of runoff from these farms enter waterways around the world, including the Mississippi River, which feeds into the Gulf of Mexico, creating the world’s largest marine dead zone, an area of minimal biodiversity, due to fertilizer-induced algal blooms and their cascade effects. Being ripped out of their ecological communities, industrial farmed species are made more vulnerable to pathogens, often fungi. This then leads to more interventions—slurries of pesticides, insecticides, fungicides, and antibiotics—many of which have severe nontarget effects and are poisonous to bodies in ways we are just now realizing.

Colonialism and the Loss of Biodiversity

Around the world, colonialism leads to biodiversity loss, in large part because of the introduction of industrial agriculture and the simultaneous eradication of peoples who so dutifully cared for their companion species. These methods are sustained because they are lucrative businesses that have led to massive accumulations of wealth for certain individuals and nation states; entire nations have been built on sugar, corn, chocolate, bananas, coffee, and other species. The true cost of these methods have been invisibilized by those in power.

Our Social History IS The Climate Crisis

What we refer to as climate change is not simply an equation of carbon parts per million in our atmosphere. Nor is climate change about how many billions of trees should be planted, nor about rote phrases like “save the Amazon.” To fully understand this crisis, we must understand the forces that brought about its possibility—both natural and social histories of our earth, including the deadly and extractive history of settler colonialism in the United States. These social realities are not coincidental to the climate crisis: they are inextricably linked; they are the climate crisis. In order to address the climate crisis, we must reckon with how these legacies continue to influence the field of conservation to this day.

Decomposing and Myceliating the Legacy of Eugenics

photo of painting in Sempervirens Fund's historic archive

A deadly combination of habitat destruction, drought, super storms, mega-fires, and more continue to threaten our precious redwoods, as well as most habitats around the world. As we struggle against the enormity of the forces described above, we must consider how conservation efforts that valorize and privilege particular species, like redwoods, without accounting for the seemingly less charismatic elements of an ecosystem, like fungi, does so at their peril. When we advocate for the less charismatic species and habitats, we help recalibrate the values of our society. In fact, turning our attention to these “lesser” elements teaches us to grapple with these complex histories.

Myceliation

mycelium in soil, photo by Kirill Ignatyev

A largely invisible network of fungal cells, called mycelium, is critical to the functioning of our planet. Yet conservationists have paid scant attention to these complicated and essential networks, favoring instead the charismatic giants that they help to support. If we want to begin myceliating the legacy of eugenics in conservation, we must become aware of the invisible, interconnections tying that dark history to the species that have been deemed worthy of protection. It is only through interrogating the hierarchies of the conservation movement that we can begin to uproot the logic of eugenics. To do so means paying attention to the organisms that are seen as inconsequential as a result of this lens, and to be aware of the history that got us here. The more we learn about fungi, the more we realize how critical they are to the ecosystems that we seek to protect. While a eugenicist lens focuses on the redwood tree as the tallest and most glorious specimen of the forest, removing that lens reveals the enormous ecological scale of less visible organisms.

What Redwoods Need

Redwoods don't become the tallest trees on Earth alone. Here are just some of the important things they need to reach great heights and ages.

Fog

Coast redwoods get an estimated 30-40% of their water from fog drip, especially during warmer weather and droughts

Fungi

Fungi like coral fungus are important symbiotic partners for redwoods and exchange nutrients through their roots

Salmon

Salmonids like endangered coho salmon add nutrients to the soil after spawning in forest creeks and rivers

Intertwined Roots

Redwood roots only go 6-12 feet deep but up to 100 feet wide to intertwine with other trees stabilizing one another in high winds and floods

Fog by F. Balthis; Coral Fungus by Ken-Ichi Ueda; Coho salmon by Bureau Of Land Managementby; Roots by Rudydale

Decomposition is key to the role that fungi play in an ecosystem and critical to the symbiotic interactions they perform—ranging from parasitism to mutualism—all of which is essential to the biodiversity of habitats around the world. Likewise, myceliating the conservation movement requires that we decompose the harmful legacies of eugenics and settler colonialism, and attend to the ways they have continued to invisibly shape our relationship to land stewardship. In addition to being fully transparent about the history of redwood conservation, committing to myceliating and decomposing the harmful legacy of eugenics would look like: 1) supporting tribal sovereignty on the lands we now call home; 2) committing to seeing all biodiversity as worthy of human care and consideration; 3) including explicit protections for fungi and other non-charismatic and/or historically neglected organisms in our conservation frameworks.

Potentially mistaken for "scat", a pile of wild animal feces, this fungi called "cramp balls" (Annulohypoxylon thouarsianum) decays wood so there is room for new tress and other species, by M. Kahn

Profound Impurity

An estimated 8% of human DNA is thought to be comprised of embeded viruses

Eugenics is not only morally wrong, it has impeded our scientific understandings of the natural world. Just as white people are not biologically superior to any other race, humans are not inherently “more evolved” than other species. As humans, we evolved within and amongst a consortium of other organisms—bacteria, fungi, plants, and other animals—some of whom have been thriving on this planet for millions if not billions of years prior to our emergence. While it is true that certain traits in human anatomy have gone through more change than those of our closest ancestors, there are many metrics by which we can define evolutionary success, including, paradoxically, the least amount of change. The forces of evolution are not moving toward any predetermined direction.

Indeed, in our very DNA, we can trace lines to bacterial ancestors; lodged in our genetic code are viruses that have embedded themselves over millennia. Our DNA is a call and response to the world around us, a multispecies story; we are profoundly impure. From the macro to the micro, it is these impurities that have allowed us to thrive for millennia.

More to Explore

• Read more about the redwood forests’ Underground Allies
• Read more about the impacts of the forced removal of Indigenous peoples and California’s colonization on forests and fires in The Past, Present, and Future of Fire and Stewardship
• Read about Our Commitment to Diversity Inclusion Equity and Justice

The post A Tangled Web: Redwoods, Colonialism, Eugenics, and Climate Change appeared first on Sempervirens Fund.

photo by Orenda Randuch.

Natives and Invasives

Native plants–evolved specifically to survive with the soil, weather, plants, animals, insects, and fungi around them–help provide food, habitat, soil nutrients, and clean water in their local ecosystem. But native plants have been drastically reduced over the last two centuries as people brought crops, grasses, trees, decorative plants, and possibly some accidental stowaways with them from their homelands as they colonized, settled, and immigrated to the United States.

Today, we have a better understanding of the impacts introducing new species can have on an ecosystem not equipped through coevolution to keep them in check and the local web of life balanced. Removing invasive species like Clematis vitalba and French broom (Genista monspessulana) that can quickly overtake the landscape and its native inhabitants is a critical ongoing struggle as we care for protected lands and restore native plants to the habitat for insects, wildlife, and the plant community. But major disasters aside, the process of planting native plants may not be as simple and straightforward as one thinks.

Beatrix and UCSC intern Mariana Macomber, who also cared for the seedlings at the greenhouse, remove invasive plants at San Vicente Redwoods, by Ian Bornarth.

It Starts With Seed

California blackberry, by zias.

To restore native plants for the myriad of benefits they perform, we start by collecting seeds from existing plants on a property. In 2017, Ian Rowbotham, Sempervirens Fund’s Senior Land Stewardship Manager, and interns from University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) gathered seeds and berries at San Vicente Redwoods from California blackberries (Rubus ursinus), western thimbleberries (Rubus parviflorus), monkeyflower (Diplacus aurantiacus), and elk clovers (Aralia californica). They delivered the botanical bounty to the UCSC Greenhouse, where Greenhouse Director Sylvie Childress and her team mimic the natural process of seed dispersal.

In the case of berries, that means imitating digestion–which, hang on, isn’t as bad as it sounds. Sylvie explains the berries are squished on paper to retrieve the seeds for washing in a sieve. But even once clean, the seeds aren’t ready to sprout. “They have germination inhibitors, so they are sown in a flat of soil and cold stratified in a refrigerator for about two to three months until they sprout,” Sylvie says. The seeds are checked frequently by Sylvie and her team because once they start to germinate, they need the sun. The little sprouting seeds are ready to pot.

The Phytosanitary Process

The potting process Sylvie and her team use for restoration plants like the seedlings isn’t so dissimilar to a medical team preparing for a procedure and that’s because the goal is to prevent the spread of disease. Pathogens like Sudden Oak Death can spread quickly through the forest and can be introduced into the wild from commercial potted plants, Sylvie says. So, when seeking to restore a habitat, it's critical the planting effort doesn’t do more harm to the forest than good.

The seedlings’ pots and tools are washed and sanitized before potting, only brand-new soil is used, and the newly potted plants are grown up off the ground so they aren’t splashed with water that can also carry Sudden Oak Death. “Phytosanitary processes are more costly but necessary,” Sylvie explains. And its helpful training for the students who frequently enter the restoration field after their time at UCSC.

Sylvie Childress, UCSC Greenhouse Director, by Orenda Randuch.

From Stubby Pots to Setbacks

California blackberry seedlings in D-pots, by Orenda Randuch.

Each sprouting seed gets a “stubby” pot to call its own. Stubby pots are frequently used for restoration plants, Sylvie says, because they take up much less space. “You can get almost 100 per rack.” Space that becomes rather more crucial as time goes on. Now potted, the seedlings would grow in the sun for another few months to round out their typical 6-month stay at the rooftop garden of the main campus’ instructional facility.

Typically, this is perfect timing to be planted late in the fall to soak up the winter rains. And a few plants were able to do just that–”outplanted” by interns at San Vicente Redwoods. But before all of the seedlings could be planted, the first disaster struck and COVID-19 rocked the world putting in-person programs like plantings–that would often necessitate riding in the same vehicle capable of navigating the rural dirt roads crisscrossing the property–on hiatus.

Lightning Strikes

Normally, these seedlings would have been planted in the forest as soon as they started to sprout. But care for the plants went on at the greenhouse, with nearly 300 remaining sprouts forced to wait out the pandemic in what might be likened to a seedling spa. While the pandemic was in full swing, lightning literally struck, igniting the CZU Fire which burned through 86,000 acres in the Santa Cruz mountains region including the seedlings home–San Vicente Redwoods–delaying their planting by another couple winters as the forest stabilized and began to recover.

All the while, the seedlings are growing and the stubby pots, ideal for plants making a quick transition out into the field, are much too small. “After their first year in those small pots, we needed to upsize them to the larger ‘D Pots’, which fit 20 per rack, in order to hold them for the time it took until they were planted out,” Sylvie explains. After a professional re-potting, the seedlings were better prepared for the long haul.

Elks clover roots, by Orenda Randuch.

“They’ve been in these pots for many years,” Sylvie says, “but the roots are staying healthy.” Their good condition is likely because of their good fortune of being at the greenhouse where they have been patiently cared for by about 50 student employees and intern experts over the years–fertilizing and pruning at “just the right time”.

Each seedling is pruned two to three times a year when it looks “crammed or less healthy” and fertilizers are diversified including liquid fertilizers as often as monthly and granular slower-release fertilizers every few months. All the while they’re being plant-pampered, our Field Operations Manager Melisa Cambron Perez points out their root systems have been able to grow and the seedlings have been able to mature through several seasons before facing the challenges that lie ahead in nature.

By The Numbers

285 Plants

240 Planted

140+ Species Associated

60 People

50 Seedlings Remaining

6 Months - Typical Timeline

5 Years - Current Timeline

3 Disasters

25% Guesstimated Survival Rate

How Many Will Survive?

Great Survival Rate

Sylvie with California blackberries, by Orenda Randuch.

For seedlings in pots, Sylvie says they’ve had a great survival rate, especially for plants that have stayed at the greenhouse much longer than other guests in her experience. In fact, these seedlings have been at the greenhouse nearly as long as Sylvie has.

Typically, when propagating plants for restoration projects, she would grow about 10% more plants than are needed to ensure enough survive for the project. However, she is less familiar with the plant’s survival rates once they leave her care. For that, we turn to our Natural Resource Manager Beatrix Jiménez-Helsley. “Plant survivorship varies greatly, and is more unpredictable during today’s climate which has shown to swing from heat waves like we saw in Winter 2022 to bomb cyclones like we’re seeing in Winter 2023,” she says. “Because of this, my guesstimate is 25% of these will survive.”

Plant Problems

While being in pots for so long has been one of the primary challenges during their time at the greenhouse, Sylvie, like Beatrix, notes that unpredictable weather will be one of the largest challenges ahead for seedlings in nature. And for 240 seedlings, this winter was when they were finally reintroduced to nature and the problems it can pose for a plant.

Twenty California blackberries and 40 western thimbleberries were planted at the new entrance to San Vicente Redwoods to help with regeneration and stabilization after construction, 50 elk clovers were planted along newly repaired crossings at Little Creek to help regeneration, and 50 elk clovers were planted alongside a stream that feeds into Mill Creek to help shade and cool it's crucial recovering endangered coho salmon spawning habitat. But the very things they were tasked to help remedy may have become the most imminent threat to the seedlings’ survival.

Elks clover at San Vicente Redwoods, by Melisa Cambron Perez.

The seedlings at the parking lot looked good, Beatrix said. But that was before the January storms–the deluge of atmospheric rivers, flooding, and bomb cyclones that hit the coast beginning on New Years 2023. Melisa notes the elk clovers planted near the waterways could be washed out from heavy storms–which isn’t difficult to imagine after seeing coverage of entire sections of road being washed away, despite the advantage of getting to develop their root system at the greenhouse for years.

Planting at San Vicente Redwoods, by Melisa Cambron Perez.

Beatrix agrees, “the elks clover planted along tributaries can be washed out from huge rains and high stream flows.” And the berries may be at risk too she points out, “the California blackberries and western thimbleberries at the parking lot were planted on slopes to help with stabilization, however, with the unexpected dump of rain, they may not have developed an extensive root system yet and are vulnerable to erosion,” Beatrix explains.

These storms aren’t just a threat to the planted seedlings either. They are also the third disaster delaying the remaining 50 seedlings from being planted at San Vicente Redwoods. The severe storms have oversaturated roads which not only prevents our team from checking on the planted seedlings it also prevents the final plantings, Melisa explains. “If the roads are too wet, then driving on them can cause damage which would in turn lead to more repairs in the future,” she said.

But the storm has also created major safety concerns, made exponentially greater because of the 2020 CZU Fire. “Given the high fire severity San Vicente Redwoods faced, a lot of trees don't have strong root systems to hold them steady in oversaturated soil and high winds, and trees have started falling–blocking roads.” Melisa continued, “ live trees have also had their tops blown off due to heavy winds–making a potential planting area too dangerous to access.”

Many parks in the Santa Cruz mountains are facing similar challenges as the storm compounds fire recovery conditions adding extra erosion, mudslides and falling trees to the mix, and temporarily closing many parks including San Vicente Redwoods while safety is assessed. With any luck, blackberries and thimbleberries will greet visitors when the gate reopens.

San Vicente Redwoods' fire recovery, by Teddy Miller.

Berry Beneficial

Golden-crowned sparrow with a blackberry smeared bill, by Becky Matsubara.

California blackberry, western thimbleberry, and elk clovers all produce edible berries that creatures can forage, Beatrix says. Their flowers can support more than one hundred different species of pollinators like moths and butterflies. They provide shade and shelter for native species. “The California blackberry can form thickets that offer protective cover to small mammals like brush rabbits and offer good nesting sites for small birds,” Beatrix explains.

California blackberries have very gentle prickles, Sylvie demonstrates by running her hand gently along them, compared to the invasive Himalayan blackberries’ giant prickles. But the Himalayan variety can be found all over the Santa Cruz mountains in part because it also has larger berries which attract birds and people alike.

California vs. Himalayan Blackberry

California blackberry flower

by Mathesont

Himalayan blackberry flower

by ldjaffe

California blackberry thorns

by Jerry Kirkhart

Himalayan blckberry thorns

by Don Loarie

While all plants compete for light and nutrients,”the biggest competitors are non-native plants,” Beatrix says. Invasive plants like the Himalayan blackberry pose the biggest challenge to the seedlings’ survival. Without an ecosystem coevolved to balance it, such as animals and insects that want to eat it, little to nothing stands in the invasive plant’s way. Hopefully, the extra growth the seedlings got during their years of favorable conditions at the greenhouse will help them withstand the non-native competition because when coupled with exposure to the elements, their growth will likely be slower in the forest, Beatrix states.

Growing the Forest

Native plantings like these help support the forest understory by supporting abiotic factors of the ecosystem–like sunlight, minerals, water, and soil–and biotic-living factors in the ecosystem. “The plants themselves, such as the elk clovers and western thimbleberry, have large leaflets which can provide shade and cooling for the soil and water on the forest floor,” Beatrix illustrates. Even underground the seedlings’ roots can provide structural support for the soil–decreasing erosion–and their root decomposition sequesters carbon. “They provide food, shelter, and habitat for resident species,” Beatrix says.

Once the roads are safe and the weather calm, Beatrix and Melisa will check on the planted seedlings and resume plans to plant the remaining 50 western thimbleberries at the UCSC greenhouse so they can help the land recover from fire, restore native habitat, and help brace the soil for the droughts, floods and fires to come.

For now the seedlings sit in pots outside a greenhouse of young redwoods, where a graduate student is working to better understand how redwoods cope with drought–information that will be invaluable for helping redwoods survive the climate changes ahead.

Mature elks clover shades a creek, by Ken Koll.

Stay tuned for an update on the Saga of the Seedlings. You can also make an impact for forest resiliency with a gift to Grow the Forest.

The post The Seedling Saga appeared first on Sempervirens Fund.

Sempervirens Fund and The Y of San Francisco Finalize Purchase of Conservation Easement to Permanently Protect Camp Jones Gulch and Redwood Forests in Santa Cruz Mountains

Nearly $10 million deal between Sempervirens Fund and The Y of San Francisco is complete and protects some of the region’s oldest redwood forests while bolstering outdoor education opportunities for future generations of students

Contact: Matt Shaffer, 415.609.2750, mshaffer@sempervirens.org

Old-Growth Redwoods, including trees more than 500 years old, tower over 39-acres and may provide habitat for the endangered marbled murrelet which is known to fly from the sea to the area’s forests to lay their eggs in uppermost branches. Photo by Canopy Dyanmics.

La Honda, Calif. (Dec. 15, 2022) — With the transfer of $9.625 million, Sempervirens Fund and The Y of San Francisco have finalized the deal to preserve the 920-acre property that Camp Jones Gulch has occupied for more than 80 years in La Honda, CA. Sempervirens Fund’s purchase of a conservation easement begins a permanent partnership between the two organizations that enables the state’s oldest land trust to ensure the now protected land is cared for, including the largest unprotected stand of old-growth redwoods in the Santa Cruz mountains.

“This is a remarkable moment for some of the oldest redwoods in the Santa Cruz mountains, for the youth that will learn from them, and for conservation across the region,” said Sara Barth, Executive Director of Sempervirens Fund. “We’re thrilled to make this new partnership official, especially at a time when the uncertainty of climate change is putting our forests at increasing risk.”

The property includes 39 acres of rare old growth redwood forest, 668 acres of young growth redwood, Douglas fir, and hardwood forests, mature oak woodlands, and other riparian woodlands. In addition to the purchase of the conservation easement–which forever protects natural resources associated with the property while keeping it in The Y of San Francisco’s ownership–Sempervirens Fund has created a $422,000 stewardship fund to support ecological restoration work on the property and implement stewardship programs to improve the health and resilience of the forest habitats. Sempervirens Fund is in the process of creating a stewardship plan for the property, which could include conservation measures such as fuel reduction, pond restoration, and vegetation management. They are also planning for marbled murrelet surveys, corvid surveys, and invasive species removal.

Since 1968, it has been a rite of passage for fifth and sixth grade students in San Mateo County, to experience a week at Camp Jones Gulch, giving them an opportunity to explore nature among the region’s ancient redwoods. The partnership, which has been in the works for a decade, is already reaping benefits at Camp Jones Gulch. Camp staff have begun construction of new facilities, replacing decades-old cabins and upgrading other infrastructure and buildings. These and future facilities will also be built in accordance with the guidance of the conservation easement.

"We are overjoyed to make this partnership with Sempervirens Fund official. A pillar of our mission is to connect young people with nature, and this deal ensures our ability to continue enriching their lives for generations to come,” said Jamie Bruning-Miles, President and CEO of the YMCA of San Francisco. “This long-term relationship means we can sustain our work at Camp Jones Gulch, be great stewards of our lands and help connect children to nature in new and exciting ways. Our commitment to nature has been ongoing for more than 80 years, and provides the resources needed to inspire young people for another 80 years.”

The partnership is an emerging model between conservation groups and community organizations to preserve land from development and address the ongoing climate crisis. The deal, secured with a blend of public and private funding including several state bonds, aligns with President Biden’s goal, and Governor Newsom’s 30x30 Initiative, to conserve 30% of lands and waterways by 2030 through collaborations that center on conservation, resiliency, and inclusion, especially at the community level.

The YMCA of San Francisco’s outdoor engagement programs are committed to creating accessibility in nature for the communities they serve. As a part of their 2030 Vision, their programs will provide more equity and access, especially to youth, to the opportunities that inspire healthy connections to nature and community. They will continue to offer nature engagement programs for those who wish to learn about natural habitats and ecosystems, to build social and emotional skills, to learn outdoor leadership skills, and more. They are dedicated to ensuring their programs and their benefits are accessible for all.

“This collaboration between Sempervirens Fund and The Y can be a model for others as we change the way we think about conservation,” said Barth. “Using this unique blend of public and private funding, including state dollars, various private funders, and our friends at Peninsula Open Space Trust, we have the ability to forever protect some of the region’s most precious trees.”

Funding for the $10 million project includes funds from Sempervirens Fund donors. In addition, Sempervirens Fund donors also funded costs associated with the easement monitoring for the next 20 years.

Purchase of the conservation easement was also funded in part by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation ($2.4 million), Peninsula Open Space Trust ($2 million), the State of California Wildlife Conservation Board ($2 million) through the Habitat Conservation Fund, Fish and Game Code Section 2786(a); the California Department of Fish and Wildlife ($1 million) through the Water Quality, Supply, and Infrastructure Improvement Act of 2014 (Proposition 1); and the California State Coastal Conservancy ($950,000), through the California Drought, Water, Parks, Climate, Coastal Protection, and Outdoor Access For All Act of 2018 (Proposition 68).

“Funding for this conservation project represents the exact kind of investments across public and private sectors that make a difference,” added Barth. “Every donor dollar went three times further with public funds. Bringing together multiple sources of bond funding makes each voter-approved measure more valuable.”

“This is a rare and important conservation opportunity to protect not only old-growth redwood forest, but also headwater streams, and coastal prairie grassland.” said Dan Winterson, who manages the Bay Area Conservation Program at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. “We are very pleased that we were able to support Sempervirens Fund’s persistent efforts to bring this project to fruition.”

The post NEWS: Camp Jones Gulch Protected appeared first on Sempervirens Fund.

photo by Ian Bornarth.

Small Seeds, Mighty Mission

Each seemingly puny seed–containing the ability to become the tallest tree on Earth and store more carbon than any other species–was gathered in the Santa Cruz mountains and grown more than 100 miles away in a greenhouse. The safe, controlled environment was perfectly tuned to the needs of a germinating redwood seed by experts at University of California - Davis. Here, the seedlings grow to about a foot tall, sporting several branches of bright green leaves–still small in size but not in numbers.

There are nearly 24,000 of them, a large number equal to their large mission. CalFire’s L.A. Moran Reforestation Center provided these 23,000 redwood seedlings, and 900 Douglas-fir seedlings, for post-fire recovery at San Vicente Redwoods. All of its 8,852 acres burned in the 2020 CZU Wildfire–the most recent in a century-long list of damaging impacts that the forest has endured.

Redwood cones and seeds, by Roger Culos.

Re-establishing the redwood forest in its former footprint was important even before the fire. The fire made them–and the Douglas firs–even more important than we’d ever thought possible.

Green recovering redwoods along Big Creek, photo by Teddy Miller.

Clear-Cuts and Conflagration

Subjected to clear-cut logging more than a century ago, tanoaks and other fast-growing hardwood trees quickly grew in the stead of the redwoods and Douglas-firs that had dominated San Vicente Redwoods’ forests before. If left in that condition, the redwood forest’s recovery could take centuries–leaving plant and wildlife species with a huge, unhealthy habitat in the middle of 27,000 crucial, protected acres. But the fast-growing hardwoods also lack a crucial feature: the fire resistance of mature redwoods.

Then, the CZU Wildfire blazed through San Vicente Redwoods in 2020. While 90% of the redwoods it touched are expected to recover, they will take decades to become green again. And most of the hardwood trees and many of the Douglas-firs have not survived. But the loss of less fire resilient trees opens up room on the forest floor and the canopy above, giving the fire-resistant redwood seedlings a headstart to restore their footprint. This will accomplish a long-sought after goal: re-establish redwoods. Important ecologically, this is now imperative for the anticipated wildfires, droughts, and other climate changes ahead.

Near the headwaters of Big Creek, one of eight creeks that flow across the vastness of San Vicente Redwoods, the fire was especially scorching. The loss of trees and plants left the watershed at risk for major erosion with the soil, untethered by healthy roots, more easily washed away from where it’s needed on the forest floor and into the stream–muddying up its water quality and clogging up its flow. While the seedlings grew quickly in the safety of the greenhouse, they could serve a crucial role in the Big Creek watershed.

From Pots to Planting

In January 2022, the seedlings traveled southwest in the cool comfort of a refrigerated truck back to the Santa Cruz mountains and their new home at San Vicente Redwoods. Over about two weeks, the saplings were removed from the confines of their pots one by one and placed into pouches carried by professionals like Nadia Hamey, Property Manager and Forester of San Vicente Redwoods, to its carefully selected site with plenty of room to grow wide and tall to its full potential. The 23,000 redwoods were lovingly planted by hand–across 4,000 acres in the Big Creek watershed–and wished good luck. Now, they’re on their own.

Free from their pots and planted in the ground, the rest is up to the seedlings. But the harsh reality is many won’t make it. Despite the renowned resilience of redwoods, these seedlings are at their most vulnerable. Field Operations Manager Melisa Cambron Perez, who has worked on many other planting projects, says their survival rate could be much lower than 40%, based on her experience with plant survivorship in grasslands, oak woodlands, and wetlands that faced fewer challenges.

video by CalFire.

Nadia Hamey, Property Manager and Forester of San Vicente Redwoods, planting redwood sedlings, by Ian Bornarth.

Considerable Challenges

University of Santa Cruz interns are coordinating with Nadia to support monitoring their survival rates. Although this number may sound disheartening, redwoods propagate much more successfully sprouting from an existing tree than they do from seeds. New trees that sprout from a parent tree, such as in iconic redwood family circles and fairy rings, have the benefit of support from that tree’s well-established interconnected root and fungi network which can access water and nutrients from untold feet or even acres of soil. It will take time–and tolerance–for these seedlings to develop their root systems.

While their growth is no longer constrained by their pots, “Going from a pot to the ground alone is a major shock for plants”, Melisa says. Not to mention the seedlings have lived all of their lives in the safe, controlled environment of the greenhouse with ideal temperatures, light, and water for a redwood. At San Vicente Redwoods, they’ll be exposed to the elements, drought, and hungry competing fauna.

When the seedlings were first planted in January, the ground was still relatively bare leaving the seedlings as targets for hungry wildlife. But since then their fire-responding neighbors have been voraciously rebounding and while these plants help protect the seedlings from being eaten–reducing one risk to the seedlings survival–they are themselves, ironically, the seedlings biggest challenge to survival.

It is rare for redwoods to seem small, but yerba santa, 8-10 foot tall ceanothus, and bush poppies, to name a few are towering over the seedlings. Lush examples of nature’s recovery from the fire, they outcompete the seedlings for space, water, and sunlight at this stage.

However, when a 2,000 year lifespan lies ahead of you, you can afford to be patient and bide your time. Adapted to sprout under the canopy of their giant kin, redwood seedlings have more tolerance for shade than many other plants and trees. Luckily for these little seedlings, they won’t have to wait too long.

A Redwood Seedling in January 2022

A Redwood Seedling in November 2022

photos by Ian Bornarth.

Forest of the Future

Within the year, Nadia, Melisa, and the Land Team plan to “release” them by thinning the surrounding vegetation to increase the redwood’s chances of survival and free them to grow on their own. Through multifaceted forest restoration strategies like this, the Land Team hopes to help redwoods grow to their full potential–providing habitat and clean air for generations in the thousands of years to come.

You can make an impact for forest resiliency with a gift to Grow the Forest.

The post Story of a Seedling appeared first on Sempervirens Fund.

photo by Pathways for Wildlife

Why Wildlife?

Unlike statuesque and stationary redwoods, the wildlife they help provide habitat for can be rather difficult to see–whether they’re well-camouflaged, super speedy, ranging across huge habitats, seasonal, or prefer to move under the cover of darkness. Monitoring wildlife can help to assess overall ecosystem health and give us a sense of what species are using different parts of the property, so we can plan projects as needed, coordinate with researchers, and assess areas and seasons to reduce use. Although wildlife often shy away from people, science has developed many ways to uncover the presence of wildlife on the land, in the water, and in the air.

End of the Range

The Santa Cruz mountains are close to the end of the range for redwoods, endangered coho salmon, and endangered marbled murrelets. This southernmost habitat marks the edge of favorable conditions like temperature and precipitation that these species need. And of course, climate change is pushing those temperatures higher and pushing the water cycle further into extreme undulations between drought and deluge. Monitoring these species here in the Santa Cruz mountains can not only give us invaluable data for the species as a whole but also inform adaptive management stewardship strategies.

Multifaceted partnerships with experts help to gather and analyze data to guide whether action is needed to better restore the natural processes altered by recent human impacts such as clear-cut logging, damming, and the introduction of invasive species.

“Protecting wildlife that are there is a part of our goal. Understanding where they are, what they are doing, and when helps us to manage the land holistically,” our Natural Resource Manager Beatrix Jiménez-Helsley explains. We monitor wildlife across our protected lands but San Vicente Redwoods has been a research hotspot–a living laboratory for field studies–for over a decade and with the upcoming opening of its new trails, we’re poised to learn even more.

illustration by Ink Dwell.

San Vicente Redwoods

San Vicente Redwoods was protected in 2011 as a dynamic partnership with Peninsula Open Space Trust, Save the Redwoods League, and the Land Trust of Santa Cruz County. Since then, San Vicente Redwoods’ nearly 9,000 acres including old-growth redwoods, oak woodlands, grasslands, and eight creeks have hosted a plethora of research from geomorphology studies on its unique karst systems underground to the many species that soar, roost, or nest in the redwood crowns and cliffs above. Countless things make San Vicente Redwoods extraordinary but with the partnerships’ plans to open San Vicente Redwoods for public recreation, being able to monitor wildlife before and after it opens is extremely valuable data.

Through various research approaches to wildlife monitoring, we are able to get a glimpse behind the curtain at the creatures in the land, water, and air.

photo by Ian Bornarth.

photo by Ian Rowbotham.

Click a topic below to learn more about monitoring wildlife on the land:

Peregrine Falcons Expand

photo by Roy W. Lowe, UFWS

In 1970, just two productive peregrine falcon nests could be found in all of California. Today, at least three peregrine falcon nests are known within a 15-mile radius of Santa Cruz alone–one of which is at San Vicente Redwoods. The nest, perched in rocky outcroppings, as peregrine falcons traditionally do, has been monitored by Predatory Bird Research Group at University California Santa Cruz for several years. Peregrine falcons remain fully protected in California, and successful hatchlings are banded to continue gathering information on the species.

Arguably the fastest animal on earth, with diving speeds estimated to reach over 200 miles per hour, monitoring peregrine falcons at nesting sites is far more conducive than trying to monitor them out and about. Unlike another protected species capable of impressive speeds.

Pumas Expand

photo by Sebastian Kennerknecht

The largest creature currently roaming San Vicente Redwoods is the puma, which requires an understandably sizable habitat to sustain itself. Their extensive ranges are likely one reason only 40 known pumas are active in the Santa Cruz mountains. With habitat frequently interrupted by communities and development, it is difficult for pumas to access habitat and other puma populations they need to thrive.

Once thought to be solitary creatures, the Santa Cruz Mountains Puma Project’s research has uncovered invaluable insights about the mysterious and often misunderstood “ghost cats”. The team is monitoring pumas throughout the region and on San Vicente Redwoods employing an array of monitoring equipment including radio collars to track their behavior. Data from the Puma Project and wildlife monitoring cameras at San Vicente Redwoods helped to shed light on puma activity on the land. It also informed where to build the new hiking trails at San Vicente Redwoods to minimize disruption to wildlife pathways and avoid puma dens.

 

As our communities grow and habitat becomes less and less available, ensuring our time in nature has as little impact as possible on wildlife is paramount. Monitoring wildlife on our properties can help us adapt management plans based on the actual behaviors and needs of wildlife.

Wildlife Photo Index

In 2019, wildlife monitoring equipment was strategically deployed across San Vicente Redwoods to gather baseline data on how wildlife actually use the land. Motion sensor cameras positioned in key areas to capture wildlife presence and behavior have returned a treasure trove of data–as well as pretty fantastic wildlife selfies. Here are our Top 12 shots of wildlife at San Vicente Redwoods so far:

Wildlife monitoring photos with our San Vicente Redwoods partners Peninsula Open Space Trust, Save the Redwoods League, and Land Trust of Santa Cruz County by Pathways for Wildlife.

Click below to learn more about the next steps in monitoring wildlife on the land:

Next Steps Expand

With several years of wildlife camera data, we can compare when, where, and how wildlife use the forest before and after public access. This will help us to understand the direct impacts of the trails on wildlife when San Vicente Redwoods’ trails open to the public on December 3, 2022. How much will wildlife behavior change after the presence of people?

We and our research partners will continue to monitor wildlife populations to inform if any changes to the adaptive management plan are needed, helping to ensure ecosystem health over time so these magnificent creatures can continue to thrive at San Vicente Redwoods alongside human populations.

The trails will just be the latest addition of what makes managing San Vicente Redwoods unique. Its vast size encompassing diverse habitats supports many types of plants and wildlife including rare, threatened, and endangered species which are helpful to monitor to ensure they are supported. These species are often sensitive to changes in the habitat so if they thrive in this ecosystem many more plants and wildlife will also benefit.

Motion sensor cameras have truly increased our ability to detect wildlife on the land we would rarely see otherwise. But what about wildlife in the water or air? Especially for species that are already rare to begin with?

photo by Ian Bornarth.

Click a topic below to learn more about monitoring wildlife in the water:

Coho Salmon Expand

photo by Bureau Of Land Management

At the southern end of their range, already endangered coho salmon have been an even rarer sight in the Santa Cruz mountains for the last several decades. Living their lives at sea and following streams into the mountains to spawn in forest-shaded fresh waters, as generations before them have done, coho rely on two different types of habitat, effectively doubling the effects of climate change.

For more than a century a defunct dam in Mill Creek at San Vicente Redwoods blocked coho from moving upstream, and blocked cobble from moving downstream to create crucial spawning beds. With plans to remove the dam and restore the critical habitat for endangered coho and the entire watershed, researchers from University of California Los Angeles and Amah Mutsun Land Trust conducted eDNA surveys along Mill Creek–collecting water samples to find environmental DNA in the water–evidence of its fish populations while the dam was still in place.

Before the dam could be removed, lightning ignited the CZU wildfire in 2020 which burned nearly all of San Vicente Redwoods. A small silver-lining to the devastating fire was that while it damaged crucial water infrastructure for the town of Davenport, its subsequent repair and replacement made removing the dam possible. So, after a century of damming and a decade of planning its removal, the dam face itself came down in about a day. Soon after, an epic storm helpfully washed critical cobble downstream to help establish suitable spawning grounds around Large Woody Debris structures.

Before, during, and after the dam’s removal, aquatic biologists monitored the creek habitat and its inhabitants helping to guide the project with the health of both top of mind. A particularly phenomenal monitoring visit occurred less than a year after the dam had been removed. The team, equipped with nets, buckets, and an electronic fishing pack, carefully inspected Mill Creek for fish–and the very first fish they found that day was an endangered coho salmon–the first sighting ever recorded in the creek. The fish were quickly and carefully measured, counted, logged and returned to the water. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife was able to take fin clippings from the coho salmon for DNA and genetic testing that can determine down to a family level where the coho came from–providing a better understanding of this species’ migration and this exciting sighting.

Next Steps Expand

Beatrix assessing Mill Creek's flows for Large Woody Debris installations, by Ian Bornarth

While we await the results of these substantive first steps into the past and present of Mill Creek’s fish populations, research continues to inform our next steps. University of California Los Angeles and Amah Mutsun Land Trust researchers plan to obtain new eDNA samples from Mill Creek to see if there is any evidence of early changes in the fish community since the dam’s removal.

Large Woody Debris installations recreate natural conditions in the creek that catch cobble and sediment to form gravel beds suitable for spawning and provide shelter and creek crossings. Based on the initial progress of Large Woody Debris installations, our Senior Land Stewardship Manager Ian Rowbotham says more structures will be designed and permitted over the next year and a half to capture more sediment as it continues to shift and move down the creek over time.

And ongoing surveys with our Land Team members and aquatic biologists will monitor both the fish and the creek as cobble and sediment continue to move downstream to form potential spawning beds to see if any further action is needed.

“If endangered coho salmon successfully spawn in Mill Creek, it will point towards the benefits of restoration,” Ian says.

Ian and Beatrix explain monitoring is the key to adaptive management. “We monitor to see if anything is needed, and if so, we take strategic actions to restore natural processes to play out as they would have without human impacts,” Ian says.

“We try to restore ecosystem services so it can be self-sufficient and native species can return,” Beatrix agreed. But what she noted further complicates matters: not everything is the same as it was before those human impacts–bears and regular cultural burning are no longer present in the Santa Cruz mountains but climate change and invasive species are.

Invasive species present an ongoing stewardship struggle as without natural local predators to keep them in check they can quickly outcompete native species and disrupt natural processes. Invasive plants like Clematis vitalba had to be removed from choking Mill Creek and much of the forest, and non-native wildlife like bullfrogs can take over ponds and take out native species like the endangered California red-legged frog.

Stay Tuned for Amphibians Expand

A slender salamander in a spiral, by Ian Bornarth

Researchers with University of California Santa Cruz have conducted amphibian surveys at San Vicente Redwoods to get a better understanding of what native and invasive species are currently present. They are compiling data and creating an amphibian field guide that should be available in 2023. In the winter, when it's wetter, they hope to do additional salamander surveys with in-person methods.

These varied approaches to monitoring aquatic wildlife help to provide a picture of all the species currently present–those we can see and even those we can’t through evidence left in the water. In a similar regard, monitoring wildlife in the air, particularly notoriously mysterious species, can be accomplished through evidence in the air.

photo by Canopy Dynamics.

Click below to learn more about the next steps in monitoring wildlife in the air:

Marbled Murrelets Expand

by G. Bartley

When the CZU wildfire burned 86,500 acres, including the first ever recorded location of a marbled murrelet’s nest–in Big Basin Redwoods State Park–it was feared it could be a major if not final blow to the already endangered seabird’s presence in the Santa Cruz mountains. Yet just one year later, another incredible first occurred in Big Basin, a marbled murrelet was filmed fledging its nest. This was a great sign of hope for the resilience of the redwood forest, the Santa Cruz mountains, and for this struggling species in the most southern stronghold of its range.

Marbled murrelets, described as a flying potato, spend much of their life on the ocean but like the coho salmon make their way inland to the forests to lay their eggs. Nesting atop old-growth trees like the redwoods and Douglas-firs in the Santa Cruz mountains, Ornithologist Steve Singer had estimated about 50% of their suitable habitat had been lost in Big Basin Redwoods State Park. While nearly all of the redwoods are expected to recover in time, their canopies were still impacted and a much heavier toll was taken on their less fire resistant Douglas-fir neighbors which are unable to recover through epicormic sprouting as redwoods can. Needless to say, the CZU wildfire left the fate of the seabird looking bleak until a nest was discovered in Big Basin again in 2021.

Adapted to return to the forest for nesting, adult marbled murrelets turn a mottled brown during breeding season, making them more difficult to spot in the canopy. Despite being described as potatoes, they are deceptively fast. Their stubby wings–suited for flying underwater–are also well-adapted for the forest. Beatrix says they can fly up to 100 miles per hour–to help them evade predators in the forest. Their comparatively small wing size means they have to beat their wings constantly and rapidly to stay aloft.

Perhaps more potato-like, is their maneuverability. Although they have fast wing beats, they can’t hover like hummingbirds nor can they make any sudden turns. A hummingbird beats its wings between 10 and 80 times per second. Having been trained to conduct inland field surveys for marbled murrelets the last two years, Beatrix can attest to hearing their fast wing beats–which she says sound like a boomerang– and their calls–referred to as “keers”– across the sky far more often than she could track them flying under the cover of darkness.

Marbled murrelet calling bout spectogram, by Conservation Metrics

While most of our properties burned in the CZU wildfire’s considerable footprint, remarkably marbled murrelets have been detected at 3 out of 5 monitoring locations. So how do we monitor for these rare, elusive birds unlikely to be seen in-person or to conveniently land in front of a monitoring camera? Through the air. Acoustic Recording Units set to record at marbled murrelets’ most active times in the forest–around sunrise and sunset–were set at 5 different locations by staff. The hundreds of hours of field recordings were then processed with a pattern recognition software to specifically detect the “keer” calls of marbled murrelets allowing the researchers to hone their manual review in on high probability calls and check for the sound of wing beats before and after which could indicate proximity to a nesting site.

Next Steps Expand

Steller's jay at San Vicente Redwoods by Pathways For Wildlife

The Audio Recording Units were able to record detections of marbled murrelets, but the recording can’t tell us if the marbled murrelets are nesting or whether any marbled murrelets hatched–although wing beats would have been an indication. For that, Beatrix says the first step would be in-person surveys to confirm if they’re occupying the tree stands. To increase the effectiveness and efficiency of in-person surveys, Beatrix will meet with other land managers and experts in the Zone 6 area–U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s official name for this section of marbled murrelet habitat–to coordinate collective efforts to monitor marbled murrelets with Acoustic Recording Units and in-person surveys. In the long term, potential nesting habitat at San Vicente Redwoods is being restored to enhance conditions for the forest and for marbled murrelets. For now, the marbled murrelets are out to sea.

While we await their return, we can all play an important part in helping to prepare for potential nesting by keeping our parks and lands “Crumb Clean”. Marbled murrelet eggs can fall prey to corvids including jays, ravens, and crows, which tend to follow human presence in hopes of crumbs. As the trails at San Vicente Redwoods open, we’ll continue to monitor for corvids to see if human presence leads to an increase in these opportunistic birds and identify whether any changes in use are needed to help protect marbled murrelets.

You can read about a rare marbled murrelet fledgling encounter and our regional in-depth monitoring to support this endangered species.

Stay Tuned for Bats

Expand

by USFWS

Important nocturnal pollinators and natural insect control, bats are an important part of the ecosystem and have been known to roost in the hollows of redwoods among other places–including a pond at San Vicente Redwoods where a bat detector was installed this fall. Once the acoustic sensor has been analyzed to determine which species have been detected, Dr. Winifred Frick with Bat Conservation International hopes to be able to monitor bats on the property more extensively when they are more active in the late spring and summer months. In the meantime, you can read about bats documented at San Vicente Redwoods during previous surveys.

Sensitive Species, Significant Signs

The presence of marbled murrelets and coho salmon–two sensitive species–after the CZU wildfire are encouraging signs for the continued recovery of the forest, although populations fluctuate naturally and many other factors can come into play that can affect wildlife species. For marbled murrelets and coho salmon in particular, these endangered species rely on two different habitats which doubles the potential impacts from human activity such as oil spills and dams as well as greater shifts from climate change. Monitoring and collaborating with experts and landowners across the region helps to provide the bigger picture of the species as a whole and the potential for coordinating adaptive management across a greater swath of the range, hopefully benefitting more coho, marbled murrelets, and many more species in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

photo by Teddy Miller.

Monitoring and Management

During the next few years of monitoring, we will gain a better understanding of the wildlife that inhabit San Vicente Redwoods and will be able to see if the presence of people significantly impacts wildlife’s behavior or movement in the forest and how we can minimize the effects. With adaptive land management and data on what species use areas at different times, projects can be scheduled when they will affect less wildlife and can be added opportunistically to support specific wildlife like Large Woody Debris installations for coho salmon. Wildlife monitoring has ever-growing potential to help balance needs in the San Vicente Redwoods through adaptive land management. Thanks to our partners, The Arthur L. and Elaine V. Johnson Foundation, The William H. and Mattie Wattis Harris Foundation, Resource Legacy Fund, and supporters like you, these invaluable projects can inform future trails, land management, and a deeper regional understanding of how land can be shared by people and wildlife for generations to come.

The post Monitoring Wildlife for Healthy Forests appeared first on Sempervirens Fund.