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.

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photos by Orenda Randuch

Western Fence Lizards

Despite their camouflaging scales, Western fence lizards (Sceloporus occidentalis) are often seen conspicuously basking in the sun.

They love rocks, logs, trees, and of course fences in open, sunny areas but they’ll hide in burrows or under rocks and tree bark if its too hot or cold out.

The local subspecies of Western fence lizard in the Santa Cruz Mountains is called the coast range fence lizard (Sceloporus occidentalis bocourtii).

You may have heard them called “blue belly lizards." Orenda Randuch’s macro lens gives us a whole new appreciation for those beautiful blue scales the male lizards are known for.

Although their appearances can vary greatly from individual to individual, Western fence lizards can also appear darker before they have warmed up, and males can appear more blue when they encounter one another during breeding season.

If their beautiful blue scales aren’t enough to attract a mate, male Western fence lizards will also bob their heads and do push ups to help show off their blue throat and colors.

Western fence lizards are mostly covered in overlapping scales with spines at the tips.

Unfortunately, their overlapping scales don’t completely protect them from ticks (as modeled by an aligator lizard below). However, research suggests Western fence lizards may help decrease Lyme disease thanks to a protein in their blood that kills the disease-causing bacteria in nymphal ticks.

These diminutive, demure dragons also eat ticks—further helping to reduce the potential spread of Lyme disease—as well as other small invertebrates like crickets, spiders, and scorpions. Excitingly, Western fence lizards may even be one of the only lizard species to eat invasive Argentine ants which have disrupted the food chain their fellow Blainville's horned lizard friends rely on in the rare Santa Cruz sandhills.

When faced with danger, a Western fence lizard’s tail can easily break off, sometimes called “tail autotomy”, to allow the lizard to escape if its tail is caught or to wiggle around and distract a predator while the lizard quite literally “makes a break for it.” The broken tails do grow back but typically not as long or as strong. So, if you get to admire one of these Lyme disease-fighting-invasive-ant-eating heroes sunbathing, please try not to scare their tails off.

If you’d like to see more lizards or see them in a new way, join herpetologist and creator of #FindThatLizard Dr. Earyn McGee Under the Redwoods for her expert tips and tricks.

More to Explore

• Learn more about how to #FindThatLizard with Dr. McGee Under the Redwoods
• Learn more about the wildlife you protect in the redwood forest
• Read about lizards and other rare wildlife in the Santa Cruz Sandhills

The post An Extraordinary Look at an Ordinary Lizard appeared first on Sempervirens Fund.

Find That Lizard

Learn about how to #FindThatLizard with the expert, Dr. Earyn McGee, the Coordinator of Conservation Engagement at the Los Angeles Zoo, Under the Redwoods on Tuesday, 10/29 from 1 to 2 pm Pacific.

Register for Under the Redwoods

The post Find That Lizard appeared first on Sempervirens Fund.

illustration by Jane Kim, Ink Dwell Studios

We’re delighted you have joined us as Sempervirens Fund’s first Forest Fellow! What does being a Forest Fellow mean to you?

"It’s an incredible honor. Redwoods are one of the wonders that first pulled me to California more than 20 years ago. I still feel this awe that drew me to Northern California. To be the first Sempervirens Fund Forest Fellow brings a smile to my face."

What do you hope to accomplish as a Forest Fellow?

"I hope to learn as much as I can about coast redwoods forests and create art that deepens our relationship with these spectacular ecosystems."

Jane Kim, fine artist and Sempervirens Fund's first Forest Fellow, courtesy of Ink Dwell Studios

What draws you to redwoods and the habitats and species of the Santa Cruz Mountains region?

"I’ve loved trees my whole life, and coast redwoods are some of the most extraordinary. From their lifespan and magnitude to all their invisible secrets of survival, coast redwoods hold eons of wisdom. The Santa Cruz Mountains are especially interesting because of their more pronounced climate zones relative to the northern range. For example, in the southern range, redwoods are having to adapt to higher temperatures and less fog. We can observe adaptations of redwoods between varying climates to understand their survival limits."

illustration by Jane Kim, Ink Dwell Studios

Did the CZU Fire change how you see, connect with, or depict redwoods or other species in the Santa Cruz mountain region?

"Of course! I knew that redwoods are resilient, but I had no idea that there were so many adaptations invisible to the naked eye like the tree’s amazing ability to store arbuscular-mycorrhizal fungi (AMF), in unique structures in their roots referred to as “rhizonodes.” This is just one example! So many others that I’m learning along the way. It shook my own understanding of dying, dormancy, regeneration, and cycles."

Watch a resilient redwood stump surprise Jane in episode 2 of Curiosity Stories.

On the 4th anniversary of the CZU Fire, you shared that redwood trees might be our exact opposite in nature. Could you tell us more about this idea?

"I think of redwoods as our opposite in their approach to living. They play the long game! Our lifespan averages ~80 years and I do believe that limits our ability to truly be long-term planners.

A redwood’s life can span more than one thousand years. And the way the redwood is able to live this long is by adapting to its environment rather than controlling the environment. The fog loving trees can even produce a bit of its own fog! Terpenes, the compound that give redwood its odor, when released into the air, they form tiny particles that can become the condensation nuclei, or seed, for fog.

People on the other hand, want to control their environment to fit the monoculture life that we have created. Trees in the Santa Cruz Mountains look different than the ones in Humboldt because they have adapted to different places. Let’s look at Arizona or even Southern California. No matter the environment, humans force a certain way of living. In these drier climates, if we were like redwoods, we’d create homes and infrastructure in an adaptive manner like using composting toilets instead of ones that use water. Homes could be subterranean so less energy would be used for air conditioning. But humans define a standard of living and wildly alter the environment to meet the standard. It’s all backwards!"

illustration by Jane Kim, Ink Dwell Studios

illustration by Jane Kim, Ink Dwell Studios

How are you exploring humans’ relationship with the elements in your current series?

"I am printing a redwood cookie that was collected at the Gateway to Big Basin. This is reminiscent of logging and our initial relationship to redwoods as a lumber source."

You recently shared your piece FIRE which layers detailed painted woodpeckers atop a black and white print of tree rings seemingly lit from fire within its cracks. What can you tell us about the inspiration behind this piece and the woodpecker’s role?

"There will be four pieces in this upcoming series. Each one will focus on our classical elements—fire, water, earth, air—and how redwood forests are interconnected. Pileated woodpeckers benefit from burned snags and cavities in redwood forests. Their nests are then used by several smaller birds and animals. Ultimately, FIRE will depict several stories about the impacts of fire on a redwood tree and forest."

Can you share your process to create art like this?

"My practice as an artist starts with a story and then grows with research. I knew that I wanted to explore redwoods from many angles and the elements felt like a way to tell a whole story. What makes their way into the final artwork really depends on the journey research takes me. One of the most exciting things about the Forest Fellowship is the access and support I have to research, field trips, and scientific community. Without the support and collaboration of Sempervirens Fund, I couldn’t have collected the massive redwood rounds from the stump at Jones Gulch YMCA camp."

Watch Jane cut a “cookie” round from a redwood stump in episode 1 of Curiosity Stories.

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What do you hope your work in this series will inspire?

"At the end of the day, reality is simply shaped by collective perspective. Art has, since the dawn of mankind, shaped our perspective. I hope that by celebrating redwood adaptations, we may be inspired to adopt some of those into our own decisions around human infrastructure and the role we play within the ecosystem rather than dominating and changing it."

Want a behind the scenes peek at the redwood art Jane Kim has been working on at Ink Dwell Studios? Watch Jane Kim take nature from Forest to Canvas Under the Redwoods.

illustration by Jane Kim, Ink Dwell Studios

More to Explore

• Watch Jane embark on her journey to learn more about redwoods in Curiosity Stories
• See Jane’s work illustrate complex concepts in our Redwoods and Climate series
• Learn how Jane transforms science into art in Illustrating Nature Under the Redwoods

The post The Opposite of Redwoods appeared first on Sempervirens Fund.

Habitats

Just three miles from the coast, Año Nuevo Vista’s 41 acres include a mosaic of habitat types from redwood forest to quickly disappearing maritime chaparral. Atop its ridges are the chalks: a white sandy soil more specifically categorized as “Maymen rock outcrop complex” or “rough broken land.” Here, resilient fire-adapted chaparral species like knobcone pines, chinquapin, scrub oaks, and bush poppies thrive. Despite its unstable, low nutrient soil, the chalks support several rare plants that can’t be found anywhere else. The chalks are the only known habitat for the extremely rare and critically-imperiled Ohlone manzanita and Schreiber's manzanita and home to one of only five stands of Monterey pine trees in the world. Below the chalks’ quick-draining soils, healthy second-growth redwood forest and coast live oaks sprout new growth recovering from the 2020 CZU Fire. Año Nuevo Vista’s diversity of habitat types supports many plants and wildlife within its borders and throughout the watershed.

photo by Orenda Randuch

photo by Orenda Randuch

Water

The headwaters of Old Woman’s Creek spring from Año Nuevo Vista. Running through the property, Old Woman’s Creek supplies water for thirsty forests and wildlife at Año Nuevo Vista and beyond. Old Woman’s Creek feeds into Gazos Creek, a critical habitat and watershed, as well as the Pacific Ocean.

Wildlife

Endangered marbled murrelets, coho salmon, and steelhead trout rely on the Gazos Creek watershed’s route from the ocean to reproduce in the redwood forest. Marbled murrelets nest among old-growth trees while coho and steelhead spawn in creeks amongst their roots. From the redwoods to the ridges, pumas are known to traverse their large ranges along the less populated chalks, leaving their scratches in the warm sand where western fence lizards and rattlesnakes can thrive.

photo by Orenda Randuch

photo by Ian Bornarth

Connections

Año Nuevo Vista is located within the largest remaining intact habitat patch in the Santa Cruz mountains. Nestled between Año Nuevo State Park, Big Basin Redwoods State Park, and Butano State Park, it’s just one parcel away from Big Basin to the east and shares a border with protected Skylark Ranch to the south. Año Nuevo Vista is key to connecting protected habitats for wildlife and protected park lands for people. Landscapes fragmented by human development impact the health of forests, watersheds, and wildlife. By protecting Año Nuevo Vista’s 41 acres, we can improve connectivity between 62,000 acres of protected land.

Stewardship

If protected with your support, we can steward Año Nuevo Vista to help restore it from human impacts and make it more resilient for increased wildfires and climate change threats. After the 2020 CZU Fire killed many trees and plants, Año Nuevo Vista’s fragile soils are eroding more quickly and washing into the crucial Gazos Creek watershed. By repairing roads, improving drainage and planting native plants, endangered plants and wildlife will benefit. Cameras will be installed to monitor wildlife’s use and habitat needs. Some areas burned severely in the fire and by removing standing dead trees, fast growing invasive plants, and creating a fire break in a key location, the speed and severity of fires can be decreased—better protecting the forest’s resilience and opportunities for firefighters to manage blazes. Together, we can protect Año Nuevo Vista and care for its woods, water, and wildlife.

photo by Ian Bornarth

The post Protect Año Nuevo Vista appeared first on Sempervirens Fund.

A view of rare, Santa Cruz sandhills habitat on a slope surrounded by forests

A manzanita branch casts a dark shadow against the bright Zayante soil in Santa Cruz sandhills

Up close, grains of Zayante soil reflect tiny rainbows of light from their surfaces

Miocene fossil shapes can be seen in the delicate sandstone of Santa Cruz sandhills

Fossils from a sea cow found in Santa Cruz sandhills habitat

Harsh Habitat

It might look a bit barren, especially compared to the lush redwood forest next door. And unfortunately, that may have led to the mining, development, and decline of this ultra-rare habitat. But ecologist Dr. Jodi McGraw, who wrote the book—or rather the Sandhills Conservation and Management Plan—says while they may be smaller, she sees more species in the sandhills’ harsh conditions, including creatures from the redwoods and sometimes even the redwoods themselves, than she does in the forest over the decades she has studied the habitats.

Dr. Jodi McGraw examines sticky monkeyflower growing along the trail in Santa Cruz sandhills habitat

A sandy hill top dotted with tiny plants and blue flags marking the trail looks bare compared to the surrounding green habitats

A ridge of closed Santa Cruz sandhills habitat erodes in a patch on the left from continued use

Foggy redwood forest along the sunny edge of Santa Cruz sandhills

Like the shark teeth and shell fossils found in its sand, the sediment found in Santa Cruz sandhills rose up through space and time, from the bottom of the ocean during the Miocene Epoch, about 23.03 to 5.333 million years ago. Of the approximately 6,000 acres of ancient sea floor that gave rise to Santa Cruz sandhills habitat, Dr. McGraw says about 3,000 acres remain. Making them even more rare, those 3,000 acres are actually two different sandhills communities: sandhills chaparral characterized by manzanitas, and sand parkland featuring disjunct populations of ponderosa pines found much lower than their usual 3,000-foot plus elevations.

Santa Cruz sandhills sand chapparral habitat at Bonny Doon Ecological Reserve

Ponderosa pines rise from a sandy slope of Santa Cruz sandhills parkland

A sandy trail through lush, green Santa Cruz sandhills chaparral habitat and the towering redwood forest beyond

The sandy low-nutrient soil is sandhills plants' first line of defense. “This habitat is so extreme, other species can’t survive there,” explains James Maughn, a docent who guides hikes through protected Santa Cruz sandhills parkland habitat at Quail Hollow Ranch County Park. The plants that do grow here know how to survive with very little—little nutrients, little water, little shade, and very little stability in an easily shifting ground. These conditions are nearly opposite of those in the neighboring redwood forest habitat, but the water that slips through those sandy soils refills aquifers that give life to the redwoods and the rest of the ecosystem. Living in such close proximity, redwood and sandhill plant communities often share the same water, weather, and fire. And fire is sandhills plants’ next line of defense. Like coast redwoods, Santa Cruz sandhills plants are fire-adapted and need fire to survive and thrive.

James (Jim) Maughn smiles looking at a plant along the trail through Santa Cruz sandhills habitat

The still standing blackened remains of Santa Cruz sandhills plants at Bonny Doon Ecological Reserve after the 2020 CZU Fire

Lupine flowers blanket the Santa Cruz sandhills to the forest edge of recovering and dead trees at Bonny Doon Ecological Reserve three years after the CZU Fire

Persistent Plants

Sandhills species have adapted to live without what most plants need and through what most plants can’t. Unique life grows from unique conditions. Three endangered plants live in the Santa Cruz sandhills and two others can’t be found anywhere else on Earth.

Ben Lomond Spineflower

One look at their pointy petals and you can guess where the Ben Lomond spineflower (Chorizanthe pungens var. hartwegiana) gets its name. But consider yourself lucky if you do see one of these federally-endangered wildflowers. They bloom from April through July but their small populations have only been found in the Santa Cruz mountains north of Santa Cruz. While they like some habitat disturbances such as a trail edge or gopher hole to open up space for them, invasive grasses making their way from nearby homes or past misguided attempts to “stabilize” the soil are a disturbance that further threatens their survival, explains Maughn. That being said, Henry Cowell State Park Interpreter Dylan McManus might consider himself, and the sandhills, incredibly lucky. At the end of May, McManus found a patch of Ben Lomond spineflower in Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park. And it may be a new patch that no one has documented before.

Ben Lomond Buckwheat

Nestled in openings in sandhills chaparral or beneath the ponderosa pines in sandhills parkland, Ben Lomond buckwheat (Eriogonum nudum var. decurrens) blooms support pollinators from June to October. Of the 25 likely butterfly and moth pollinators, Dr. McGraw said there may be a subspecies of dotted blue butterfly exclusive to the Santa Cruz sandhills. Unfortunately, despite Ben Lomond buckwheat’s already small numbers, small habitat, and the California Native Plant Society listing it as one of California’s most rare and endangered plants, it isn’t protected by federal or state laws. Although they are a fire adapted species, with so little known about these rare habitats and their inhabitants, Dr. McGraw says the challenge has shifted from reintroducing fire to sandhills plant communities in the previous decade to preventing too-frequent fire as a result of climate change. “Fires too often can potentially prevent even fire-adapted plants from persisting,” she notes.

Santa Cruz Wallflower

Of the sandhills’ endangered plants, the Santa Cruz wallflower (Erysimum teretifolium) is the most rare. “It takes multiple years to mature and flowers only once”, explains McManus. When it does bloom, its bright yellow petals typically appear from February to May in open areas and along trail edges. “Santa Cruz wallflowers don’t do well with competition,” Maughn shares, which is why populations at Quail Hollow and Bonny Doon benefit from active management to decrease erosion, pull invasive plants, and utilize fire to fend off encroaching plants and awaken seeds.

Santa Cruz Cypress

Seeds like those of the endangered Santa Cruz cypress (Hesperocyparis abramsiana var. abramsiana), are serotinous and open only from the heat of fire. Endemic to the Santa Cruz mountains, the Santa Cruz cypress can only be found on 350 acres, half of which is Santa Cruz sandhills habitat. The Santa Cruz cypress was once found in Henry Cowell State Park sandhills habitat but now is on the brink of extinction, McManus laments.

But all isn’t lost yet.

Some endemic species are surviving in surprising ways.

Santa Cruz County Monkeyflower

A rare plant found only in the county, Santa Cruz County monkeyflower (Mimulus rattanii ssp. decurtatus) isn’t a usual suspect in most places including rare sandhills habitat. However, McManus says he sees them at Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park growing in burned areas of sandhills chaparral where it blooms from May to July.

California Pinefoot

As harsh as the Santa Cruz sandhills seem for plants, a rare endemic plant thought only to grow in northern California was recently found in sandhills habitat for the first time. “Last season, a California pinefoot [Pityopus californicus] was discovered in the Santa Cruz sandhills at Henry Cowell. It was one of the most southern coastal documentations of the plant, a range expansion for the species,” McManus shares. Finding the species further south and in such a rare and specialized habitat is unexpected.

Bonny Doon Manzanita

Although Bonny Doon manzanitas (Arctostaphylos silvicola) have silvery leaves that reflect light and keep water in order to survive in the sandhills, they can’t survive fire. But they can flourish from it. Like Santa Cruz cypress, Bonny Doon manzanita relies on fire to create areas of open, bare soil and promote seed germination, McGraw notes. Fires in the last 20 years have helped to reestablish Bonny Doon manzanitas, many of which sprouted from seeds collected underground by their rodent custodians.

Waning Wildlife

Santa Cruz Kangaroo Rat

Rodents like the rare Santa Cruz kangaroo rat (Dipodomys venustus venustus) are considered a keystone species for the outsized impact they have on their habitat. Their contributions to storing seeds likely helped save the Bonny Doon manzanita they rely on for shoots to eat and shelter in its brush. Sadly, populations monitored since the 1980s started to disappear as off trail recreation crushed their burrows and eroded their fragile habitat. A bit like a kangaroo, their powerful hind legs help them move across the shifting sands but their short front legs wouldn’t be able to dig a burrow in anything harder than the loose Zayante soils of sandhills. It was looking bleak as Santa Cruz kangaroo rats were extirpated from all but one of their only known habitat locations. Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park had the last known population of Santa Cruz kangaroo rats in the sandhills. That is, until 2019, when they were rediscovered in Sierra Azul Open Space after 76 years. Mid Peninsula Open Space began work to enhance the habitat at Sierra Azul this spring and researchers are hoping this newfound population can help them gather enough data to get the imperiled Santa Cruz Kangaroo rat the Endangered Species Act protections before these special stewards are gone forever.

While the Santa Cruz kangaroo rats may not depend solely on the sandhills habitat for survival, other species do. Like little deserts in the rainforest, Santa Cruz sandhills have nurtured creatures like the desert-iconic the greater roadrunner and more specialized species, like the Mount Hermon June beetle, contributing to the incredible biodiversity of the Santa Cruz mountains. There are still species in the Santa Cruz sandhills that haven’t been described by science, and of those that have, two are endangered.

Zayante Band-Winged Grasshopper

Zayante band-winged grasshoppers (Trimerotropis infantilis) has been federally listed as an endangered species since 1997, but it's not for lack of skills. They can only fly a few feet, but that’s pretty good by grasshopper standards, and when they fly they produce a buzzing sound that helps them evade predators. The challenge is, they are currently only known to live in Santa Cruz sandhills parkland habitat—the rarest of the rare with approximately 600 acres of suitable habitat remaining. And without fire to help hold them at bay, both native and non-native plants are moving in and changing the habitat with shade and leaf litter, which might sound harmless but it decreases both the imperiled grasshoppers and their habitat. McManus reports Zayante band-winged grasshopper populations are very small and you’re unlikely to see one in Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park but your best chance may be during their flight season from May to October, with peak flight activity between July and August.

Mount Hermon June Beetle

Their fellow endangered sandhills insect, the Mount Hermon June beetle (Polyphylla barbata) faces a few more challenges than the Zayante band-winged grasshopper. Mount Hermon June beetles spend most of their lives as grubs, enriching the rare Zayante soil underground. Despite their humble and crucial role, they’re often viewed as pests by those who encounter them. “It's really hard to get people excited about beetles,” Maughn laughs. Those who might lend the endangered species some compassion could still easily confuse it with the common ten-lined beetle. And while disappearing habitat threatens their survival, so does leaving it. Mount Hermon June beetles are attracted to light and water which can draw them from their protected habitat into nearby yards treated with pesticides and into pools—they’re not swimmers. Unsuspecting neighbors may not even realize they’ve found an endangered species.

Mount Hermon june beetle (left) is smaller with less defined lines than the ten-lined beetle (right)

Of course not all species that benefit from these rare habitats are endemic or endangered. Wildlife like bobcats, hummingbirds, and acorn woodpeckers that shelter in the redwood forest are known to seek food in the Santa Cruz sandhills. “Species utilize both habitats for a variety of reasons,” Dr. McGraw says. Even redwoods themselves can be found enjoying drainages that keep their roots wet in the sandhills, she points out, like those growing near Eagle Creek in Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park. “But banana slugs probably steer clear,” Dr. McGraw laughs. And the sandhills bring a bit of the desert to the redwoods as well.

Dylan McManus moving a Pacific Gopher Snake off trail

Merriam's chipmunks

Western fence lizard

Acorn woodpecker

Depositing an acorn

Acorns in a "granary tree"

The sandhills provide habitat for wildlife from hotter drier habitats that might not otherwise be in the Santa Cruz mountains. Like the California whiptail lizard, (Aspidoscelis tigris munda) which has a need for speed and enjoys the Santa Cruz sandhills warm, open, sands where they can bury themselves and run down their prey while hunting. But some of these species are also feeling the impacts of our presence. The greater roadrunner (Geococcyx californianus) was seen in the sandhills until they were unfortunately hunted down by domestic cats living nearby in 1964. Invasive ants also living in homes nearby are making their way into the sandhills and outcompeting the native ants the Blainville's horned lizards (Phrynosoma blainvillii)—still recovering from a century of exploitation being sold as pets and varnish-coated tourist souvenirs—eat there.

Saving Sandhills

Santa Cruz sandhills habitat is not only extraordinarily unique—complementing the redwood forests and adding tremendous biodiversity to the Santa Cruz mountain region—it’s also extraordinarily fragile. “We’re still learning about this community, but the learning window is closing and it's important for us to steward it before it disappears,” McManus says. The good news? The second longest contiguous stretch of Santa Cruz sandhills habitat left on Earth is protected at Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park. But the struggle to save it is far from over.

“When you add hiking, biking and horseback riding to sandhills, the landscape changes at an alarming rate”

The trail in this second largest contiguous stretch of sandhills follows the edge of a restricted area, allowing visitors to enjoy the fragile area from the perimeter with minimal impact to the sensitive habitat and its inhabitants. But sadly some visitors are loving the sandhills to death by going off trail, making their own trails, and tearing out trail signage that helps other visitors stay on trail. “The trail system (in the sandhills extension) can be confusing due to the fact that illegal and new trails are continually being developed within the closed area, and the park faces an uphill battle to install infrastructure that isn't vandalized," McManus shares. And while some may think going off trail isn’t that big of a deal, in sandhills, it's one of the biggest. “This isn’t sandstone like Moab,” McGraw explains. “This crumbles at your touch. Sandhills erode incredibly fast,” she continues. When you add hiking, biking and horseback riding to sandhills, the landscape changes at an alarming rate, McManus agrees.

Luckily, there are several ways you can recreate responsibly in and learn more about how to protect Santa Cruz sandhills.

Where to Go

While many wildflowers bloom in spring, sandhills plant communities will begin flowering with manzanitas in the winter with wildflowers blossoming in the spring and often lasting through summer.

Guided Hikes

• In the summer, McManus says Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park leads hikes in the sandhills at 9am on the second Saturday every month. Check out their schedule for the next hike.
• April is the only time of year the public can visit Quail Hollow’s ultra-rare sandhills parkland habitat. It’s only accessible by guided hikes every Sunday. Spaces are limited and fill up fast, so Maughn recommends visitors check for openings in February or March.

Trails

If you can’t snag a space on one of the highly sought after guided hikes, here are some of the best trails to admire the fragile fleeting beauty of Santa Cruz sandhills habitat:

Bonny Doon Ecological Reserve

Dr. McGraw recommends the Silverleaf and Wallflower loops to traverse sandhills habitat.

Learn More

Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park

McManus suggests hiking to the Observation Deck, which has both easy and moderate version, for a trip through and a great view of sandhills.

Learn More

Quail Hollow Ranch County Park

Maughn recommends the Sunset Trail that features sandhills chaparral along the way.

Learn More

How to Help

The Sandhills Conservation and Management Plan just turned 20 this May and Dr. McGraw is looking at updating it with the latest science and priorities. In the 20 years since the plan was created, there has been heartbreak as populations have disappeared and delight as new populations have been found. Hope is not lost—Santa Cruz sandhills greatest hope for survival could be you.

You can help by:

Staying on Trails

Staying on trails and adhering to trail closures is the best way to enjoy nature responsibly but especially crucial in such rare, fragile habitats as Santa Cruz sandhills, Dr. McGraw and McManus urge. "If we don't steward this landscape and it continues on its current path of degradation, then over time species' densities and distributions will change and the unique biodiversity we experience when recreating responsibly in this ecosystem will also begin to change,” McManus explains. Please be mindful of your impact on and movement of the sand. These soils crumble and are displaced easily, Maughn adds.

It’s estimated that two-thirds of Santa Cruz sandhills habitat is unprotected and privately-owned. If you live near these incredibly rare ecosystems, here are more ways you can help:

Volunteer

Removing invasive plants can be hard work but it's one of the most helpful ways to help care for endangered Santa Cruz sandhills habitat. Look for volunteer opportunities at parks with sandhills habitat like Quail Hollow Ranch County Park and Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park.

Pets

When living near sandhills, keeping pets inside and on leash where appropriate can have an enormous positive impact for sandhills species.

Lights

If you are a fan of bugs, you can help protect them by turning off unnecessary outdoor lights that draw them away from safer habitat. If you’re not a fan of bugs, you can see less of them by turning off unnecessary lights outside that attract them to your home. It’s a win-win!

Inform

Not everyone knows how rare, fragile, and unique Santa Cruz sandhills are. Share with others what you know about this habitat and these incredible species and let them know how they can help. Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park has lots of great resources for sharing and learning more and McManus is working on more:

• Video Playlist
• Santa Cruz sandhills video with Dr. Jodi McGraw
• Teacher Resources

The post Santa Cruz Sandhills appeared first on Sempervirens Fund.

Properties acquired by Sempervirens Fund since the 2020 CZU fire will help establish the Saddle Mountain Welcome Area at Big Basin Redwoods State Park.

Boulder Creek, Calif. (April 26, 2024) — Today, Sempervirens Fund, California’s first land trust, announced the purchase of two properties adjacent to Big Basin Redwoods State Park, which are intended to support California State Parks in creating a new entrance at Big Basin, ensuring the long-term health of its old-growth redwoods, and improving access for visitors, especially in response to the 2020 CZU fire.

Although only 10 acres, the two properties combine with 184 acres of land protected by Sempervirens Fund since 2022, in the conservation area the state agency calls Saddle Mountain. Combined, the nearly 200 acres of redwoods will be key in Reimagining Big Basin as State Parks envisions the relocation of park infrastructure like visitor services and employee housing away from their former location near prime old-growth redwood habitat. Planning for reimagining Big Basin commenced following the CZU Fire in 2020, which burned 97% of Big Basin, including the original visitor’s center and other park services buildings.

Assemblymember Gail Pellerin’s AB 2103, which passed out of committee earlier this week, makes it easier for State Parks to acquire land for Big Basin, as well as Butano and Año Nuevo State Parks.

The view from Sterrenzee Ridgetop, one of six properties protected for the Saddle Mountain Conservation Area since the 2020 CZU fire. Photo by Orenda Randuch.

“We’re thrilled to be able to expand protected land in the Saddle Mountain Conservation Area and look forward to State Parks acquiring the 200 acres to secure the new entrance to Big Basin,” said Sara Barth, Executive Director of Sempervirens Fund. “A big takeaway from the Reimagining Big Basin process was that we need to relocate critical park infrastructure away from the old-growth forests, and this land is the perfect site to make that vision a reality. Advancing AB 2103 would help expedite Reimagining Big Basin at a critical time.”

“AB 2103 will help provide State Parks timely transfers of land acquired by conservation organizations near Big Basin, Año Nuevo, and Butano State Parks to speed up the land acquisition process and permanently protect lands for conservation, cultural, or recreational purposes,” stated Gail Pellerin (D- Santa Cruz). “Following the 2020 CZU Lightning Complex Wildfire, which burned across the entirety of Big Basin Redwoods State Park and portions of surrounding parks, this bill is important to reimagine the future of Big Basin, California’s oldest state park.”

Both properties, located in the Boulder Creek Watershed, are sparsely forested with second growth redwoods and hardwoods and contain very impressive views of the upper San Lorenzo Valley. Sempervirens Fund now owns 6 properties in the Saddle Mountain Conservation Area, including the Gateway to Big Basin, Saddle Mountain Vista, and the properties that comprise Sterrenzee Ridgetop.

The Park Core Vision Concepts for Big Basin with the entrance and welcome area at Saddle Mountain. From www.reimaginingbigbasin.org

Together they are likely to be the future home for new visitor-serving facilities at Big Basin. State Parks’ Reimagining Big Basin Vision Summary from 2022 identifies Saddle Mountain as the ideal location to create a park welcome center with some new park buildings and day-use parking away from the old-growth redwood forests where they have historically been housed. Relocating park development and infrastructure, most of which were destroyed by the CZU Fire, out of the forest will increase the health and resiliency of Big Basin’s old-growth redwoods.

“Reimagining Big Basin will only be successful with partners stepping up to advance critical needs, like expanding the area of parklands around Saddle Mountain to accommodate necessary visitor-serving facilities,” said Chris Spohrer, Superintendent, Santa Cruz District-California State Parks. “We are grateful to Sempervirens Fund and their donors for protecting nearly 200-acres of forests at the entrance to Big Basin over the last three years.”

Sempervirens Fund paid $845,000 for both properties, and funding for the purchases came from the Lipman Family Foundation and more than 600 individual donors, including one bequest.

The post NEWS: Sempervirens Fund Acquires Properties for New Entrance to Big Basin Redwoods State Park; AB 2103 Advances in State Legislature appeared first on Sempervirens Fund.

THE RESULTS ARE COMING IN

Click to vote for your favorite animal!

Banana Slug

Mountain Lion

Red‑Tailed Hawk

Southwest Pond Turtle

Townsend’s Big‑Eared Bat

60%

0%

0%

0%

40%

Sempervirens Fund works to support and protect all animals in redwood forests. From banana slugs to Townsend big-eared bats. We work with specialists to ensure that these species are taken care of and can thrive for generations. Learn more about some of the different creatures that inhabit our redwood forests or make a gift to protect the redwoods these creatures call home today.

Make a gift for redwoods today!

The post World Wildlife Day: Take the Poll appeared first on Sempervirens Fund.

photo by Orenda Randuch

2023 News

Sempervirens Fund Celebrates Plan to Expand California’s State Parks by 30,000 Acres

California State Parks and Sempervirens Fund announce the permanent addition of the 153-acre NoraBella property to expand Big Basin State Park.

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Gateway to Big Basin Added to Big Basin Redwoods State Park

California State Parks and Sempervirens Fund announce the permanent addition of the 153-acre NoraBella property to expand Big Basin State Park.

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A Stewardship Story: Return to Nature

Surviving since nearly the age of the dinosaurs, redwoods are resilient—but only 5% of them have survived the last century and a half. Human impacts have left redwood forests struggling to recover. Together, we are carefully caring for the redwood forests you protect, resetting their natural systems, and helping them return to nature. 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–this year.

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Ten Ways Nature Can Help You Have a Healthy 2026

The new year often brings contemplation, motivation and resolution for greater health and happiness. In 2026, consider adding nature to your list. Nature encounters can be big, bold adventures, or family-friendly and free. There is something for everyone in this list of ten reasons, doctor’s orders, to opt outdoors this year:

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Reimagining Big Basin

In August 2021, a year after the CZU fire, California State Parks launched a visioning process for Reimagining Big Basin. Learn more, connect, and stay involved.

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Bat Chat: Nocturnal Knowledge with Dr. Winifred Frick

They’re more than creatures that go bump in the night—bats are important mammals in the redwood forest. Learn more about the bats that call California home with Dr. Winifred Frick, Chief Scientist at Bat Conservation International and a professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UC Santa Cruz.

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NEWS: Legislation Cutting Green Tape for Expanding California State Parks Now Law

AB 679 cuts through green tape so California State Parks and conservation partners can move quickly to protect our majestic redwoods, expand parklands, and bring new life to Big Basin and other parks devastated by the CZU Fire.

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Forest Stewardship: Creek to Sea

As we mark the four-year anniversary of the Mill Creek dam removal, we’re celebrating new signs of hope for coho and the interconnected habitats of the Santa Cruz Mountains—from creek to sea—exploring how they support one another, and how we support them.

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Behind the Scenes: A Botanical Survey of Castle Rock Hollow

Among the hallmarks of healthy redwood forests are trees of varying ages growing and thriving together. Achieving this diversity of ages, or chronodiversity, can improve old-growth conditions, which leads to greater habitat diversity—two essential outcomes for redwoods to thrive in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Read on to learn about the importance of chronodiveristy in coast redwood forests.

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NEWS: Sempervirens Fund welcomes Raj-Ann Rekhi to its board of directors

Raj-Ann Rekhi Gill joins Sempervirens Fund’s board of directors to help lead conservation efforts at California’s first land trust.

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125 Years

125 years in photos! In 1900, a group of citizen activists banded together to form Sempervirens Club—now Sempervirens Fund—and committed to protecting and nurturing coast redwoods. As we reflect on our legacy and look forward to the future, we are forever thankful to our vast community of supporters like you for your unwavering commitment to protecting redwoods.

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Chronodiversity in Redwood Forests

Among the hallmarks of healthy redwood forests are trees of varying ages growing and thriving together. Achieving this diversity of ages, or chronodiversity, can improve old-growth conditions, which leads to greater habitat diversity—two essential outcomes for redwoods to thrive in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Read on to learn about the importance of chronodiveristy in coast redwood forests.

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Redwoods Festival | May 18, 2025

On May 18, 2025, 125 years after Sempervirens Fund was founded, hundreds of supporters joined us at the historic Roaring Camp, for our first-ever Redwoods Festival to celebrate 125 years of protecting redwoods in the Santa Cruz Mountains! Thank you for your support!

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Why Cut Redwoods?

More than a decade ago, Sempervirens Fund was confronted with a choice: do we actively manage the forests we protect to improve their health, or do we continue to protect the redwoods as we have for more than a century and allow nature to heal on its own timeline? Active management to restore the forest would include the need to cut down trees for the benefit of the forest. With the increasing urgency to help redwoods recover from past human impacts and prepare for accelerating climate changes ahead, we collaborated with Bay Nature Magazine and author Audrea Lim to look at the shift in our redwood revolution and explore the outcomes.

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Growing Old-Growth

An old-growth redwood is huge. One of the largest living things to ever grace the planet. And their size isn’t just impressive, it’s important. In the Santa Cruz Mountains very few old-growth redwoods remain, but you’re helping to grow the old-growth of tomorrow, today. Together, we’re restoring redwood forests faster for the trees, for wildlife, for the fight against climate change, and for future generations.

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Honoring Herb Grench

Sempervirens Fund joins the conservation community in mourning the passing of Herb Grench, a visionary leader whose efforts helped shape the Bay Area’s open space landscape. Herb dedicated his life to protecting the natural world, and his contributions continue to benefit our region’s forests, wildlife, and communities. In the early 1970s, Herb played a pivotal…

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Sempervirens in Elementis

In her new art series, Sempervirens in Elementis—Latin for ever living in the elements, Sempervirens Fund’s Forest Fellow Jane Kim explores the relationship between redwoods and the elements: water, fire, earth, and air.

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David Cowman joins Sempervirens Fund as Director of Land Stewardship

David Cowman joins Sempervirens Fund as its new, and first-ever, Director of Land Stewardship, signaling the 125-year old organization’s increased emphasis on the restoration and future health of redwood forests in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

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Redwoods and Fog

We know fog when we see it, but what is fog? Fog clouds linger in cool, damp forests, lending an air of mystery and beauty around us, but the mystery is a simple one. Read on to learn about fog and their magical relationship with redwoods.

Read More

Read All News

The post 2023 News: What You’ve Made Possible 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.

Impact of climate on redwoods by Ink Dwell studio

The Impacts of Climate on Redwoods: Part 4

Cut by deep valleys, cooled by the sea breeze, and draped in fog, the Santa Cruz mountains are a southern stronghold for California’s coast redwoods. The range’s oldest trees have withstood nearly two millennia of drought, floods, winds, fires, earthquakes, and changes made by the area’s human residents.

In the final part of the Redwoods and Climate series by Julia Busiek, Sempervirens Fund explores how Earth’s constantly changing climate shaped redwoods over millions of years, how human-caused climate change is affecting redwoods today, and what the future holds for the iconic forests of the Santa Cruz mountains.

Read Part 1

Living in a Changed Climate

The past few years have been a climate wake-up call for people who live, work, and play in the Santa Cruz mountains. Residents have felt uncertainty and terror as summer skies have filled with smoke for weeks on end. This fear and devastation reached new heights in the 2020 CZU fires, which burned over 85,000 acres in Santa Cruz and San Mateo counties. That fire raged amidst the three driest years on record statewide, which were capped by a record-breaking heat wave that seared the whole state in September 2022. In December, a switch seemed to flip: by one count, California has since been hit by at least 14 atmospheric rivers this winter, a seemingly constant stream of storms that have breached levees, smashed rainfall records, flooded homes and businesses, and washed out roads and trails throughout the Santa Cruz mountains.

“It feels like we’re really living in a changed climate now,” says Laura McLendon, director of land conservation for Sempervirens Fund. “A decade ago, climate change still felt like something off in the future that we were planning to prevent. Whereas now, we know we can’t stop it, so we’ve shifted our mindset to adapt around these changes.”

Climate Forecast for Redwoods illustration, by Jane Kim, Ink Dwell Studio

To respond to the rising threats to redwoods, and the natural and human communities that share their habitat throughout the region, Sempervirens Fund is sharpening its conservation strategy to focus more squarely on climate resiliency and redwood survival. In its recently published Climate Action Plan, the organization explains how the region’s redwoods might respond to the best available predictions for climate change to come: deeper droughts and rising temperatures are already causing trees physiological stress, slowing their growth, and making them more vulnerable to disease, disturbance, and fire. As for precipitation, some climate models predict longer annual dry spells and more powerful winter storms. That could mean more flooding, which might wash away the roots of heat- and drought-stressed trees, and less-reliable water availability throughout the growing season.

Since 1900, Sempervirens Fund has protected 36,000 acres of threatened redwoods throughout the Santa Cruz mountains. Now, McLendon says, the organization is doubling down on efforts to ensure that those protected forests have the best shot at withstanding the changes to come, while effectively prioritizing conservation opportunities for the thousands of acres that remain vulnerable throughout the region.

What do those commitments mean in practice? And what data and research are available to guide decision-makers at Sempervirens Fund and their partners throughout the region?

“Water is this species’ Achilles’ heel.”

Redwoods are a remarkably resilient species. Their thick, spongy bark insulates the wood within from flames, and they harbor the rare ability to resprout limbs and leaves after fire. The trees also secrete chemicals that resist insects, fungus, and rot. These are a few of the characteristics that can keep an individual redwood in the Santa Cruz mountains standing—and even gaining mass—for well over a thousand years, while generations of Douglas firs, oaks, and bay laurels grow up and die off.

But there’s a reason it’s hard to find redwoods more than fifty miles inland from the relatively wet, temperate coast of Northern and Central California. As Anthony Ambrose, a redwood ecologist with the forest research nonprofit, the Marmot Society, said in Part 2 of this series, “Water is this species’ Achilles’ heel.”

So, perhaps it’s no surprise that recent research reveals the toll that drought has taken on California’s redwoods in the recent past. In a 2022 study published in Forest Ecology and Management, Cal Poly Humboldt redwood ecologist Steve Sillett measured the recent growth rates of 235 trees in 45 groves, scattered evenly across the species’ range. (Read more here about how Sillett and his coauthors gathered all this data, and how his colleague Allison Carroll finally cracked the mystery of reading redwood tree rings for information about their past growth.) Then they rounded up data on three climate variables across each of the 45 sites: rainfall, minimum temperature, and maximum temperature. Next, they combined those three variables to calculate a fourth: the standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index, or SPEI. This methodology, developed by Spanish climate scientists between 2010 and 2014, essentially describes the relative severity of drought conditions at a given site and time, compared to historical baseline conditions.

The researchers determined that this fourth variable, SPEI, was most closely correlated with changes in redwood growth rates, and that trees further south in the range responded more drastically—that is, grew less biomass—during droughts than trees further north. “Sequoia trees north of 40° were least sensitive to drought, producing similar biomass annually during dry and wet years, whereas trees farther south produced less biomass during individual drought years,” they found. It wasn’t until the fourth year of the drought that gripped California from 2011-2015 that forests north of 40°—roughly the Mendocino/Humboldt county line—lost much momentum. And after two years of closer-to-normal rainfall, most of these northern forests returned to their expected growth rates.

illustration by Jane Kim, Ink Dwell Studio

But south of Humboldt, researchers found that redwoods’ growth rates were more closely correlated with drought throughout the growing season. Forests in Mendocino, Sonoma, and throughout most of the Bay Area rebounded once the rains returned in 2016. But south of 37°, just about the latitude of Santa Cruz, trees didn’t seem to rebound from the drought, even in the historically rainy winter of 2017. “This is our wake-up call for redwoods at the southern end of their range,” said McLendon. “At a time when we need more redwoods growing bigger, faster—for their own health and also to maximize carbon storage—they are lagging, at best, and that’s troubling. We needed new strategies to protect redwoods, but as importantly, we needed to think about how to actively manage redwood forests to improve their growth and long-term survival.”

“We needed to think about how to actively manage redwood forests to improve their growth and long-term survival.”

—Laura McLendon, Director of Land Conservation

Deciding What To Save

The first priority in Sempervirens Fund’s Climate Action Plan is to protect land for redwoods to survive now and thrive in the long run. But as climate conditions rapidly shift throughout the region, how does the organization know that the lands it’s protecting today will still be able to support redwoods in the future?

Part 1 of this series explored how the climate models issued by authorities like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are too coarse to capture the abrupt changes in temperature and moisture from coast to inland that define the redwood range. In global climate models, “one pixel—one data point—is like 50 kilometers wide,” said Miguel Fernandez, a researcher with the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research. That’s roughly the same width as the entire range of the redwoods from west to east, meaning the best global models we have basically blink and miss the great variety that makes up the redwood ecosystem.

by Jane Kim, Ink Dwell Studio

In a 2015 paper, Fernandez sought to rectify this resolution problem. He used data from unusually hot or dry years in the past century as the basis for projections of how temperature and moisture might change within the redwood’s present range in the decades to come. His analysis zoomed way in from the scale of global climate models, splitting the redwoods’ present-day range into 800-meter pixels. Under the likeliest global climate scenarios for the middle of the century, Fernandez’s models showed that, by mid-century, the range of suitable habitat for redwoods could contract by 50 percent at its southern end, “with no suitable bioclimate remaining south of San Francisco Bay.” Fernandez’s research garnered lots of headlines when it was published (“Future coastal climate not cool for redwood forests”) and remains one of the few scientific studies that have ventured specific predictions about how predicted climate changes at the 50-kilometer scale translate to conditions we might start to see in the forests we know and love in the years to come.

Another factor that complicates the effort to predict how redwood habitat will shift in the future: the species’ range is defined by not only an overall sharp temperature and moisture gradient between the coastal and inland edges of its overall range, but also by the sort of abrupt, mountainous topography that makes for a great variety of microclimates and big differences in water availability over very short distances. “One challenge to that coarse-resolution data is the fact that conditions can vary a lot, even within an 800-by-800-meter pixel,” says Emily Francis, a research assistant professor of biology at the University of New Mexico. And since redwoods tend to grow only in areas where they get moisture year-round—whether from rainfall, fog, or perennial creeks and springs—even the relatively detailed 800-meter pixels Fernandez used to analyze the species’ range can’t capture enough detail to represent this complexity. (Francis notes that 800-meter pixels are a fairly standard size for researchers analyzing vegetation patterns across a broad landscape.)

So, Francis led a series of studies that attempted to account for the variations in redwood habitat suitability produced by hyper-local gradients in moisture availability, temperature, and fog. Francis and her coauthors gathered data across 86,000 acres in three well-loved redwood forests: Big Basin Redwoods State Park, Muir Woods National Monument in Marin County, and Jackson State Demonstration Forest in Mendocino County. They consulted existing maps and data on species occurrence and climate for these forests, but couldn’t find anything detailed enough to represent the true diversity of a patch of redwood habitat. So, they turned to emerging imaging technology to create maps of their own.

Sunset behind a blanket of fog below a forested ridge at Castle Rock State Park, by 7Roots Creative

Francis commissioned the Global Airborne Observatory (GAO), a plane loaded with what its operators call “the most advanced mapping technology operating in the civil sector today.” Flying low transects over each forest, the plane gathered data through two different instruments: a Visible-to-Shortwave Imaging Spectrometer (VSWIR) and a dual-channel LiDAR sensor. The LiDAR sensor shoots laser beams at the surface, which can both perceive and see through vegetation to piece together a high-resolution topographic map.

The imaging spectrometer, Francis explains, works something like a camera: “Your iPhone camera will show you the light an object is reflecting in the visible parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.” What our camera rolls show as blue, red, green, and yellow all correspond to different wavelengths of light; the typical human eye can detect wavelengths between 380 and 700 nanometers. An imaging spectrometer captures those wavelengths, but also near-infrared light (wavelengths from 800 to 2,500 nm) and shortwave infrared (wavelengths between 1,100 and 3,000 nanometers). “Those parts are parts of the spectrum where plant species express a lot of variability, depending on their leaf chemistry,” Francis explains. In other words, each species in the forest has its own “spectral” signature: a unique pattern of reflectance across the electromagnetic spectrum. The imaging spectrometer can detect these signatures for individual trees.

The various shades of trees in a forest in the Santa Cruz Mountains, photo by Ian Bornarth.

But the study wasn’t all laser beams and aeronautics. To “train” her data-generated maps to know what species reflects what wavelength, Francis headed out on a few good, old-fashioned site visits. In the forests, she marked the precise locations of over 600 trees, about half of which were redwoods, across the three study sites. She then fed that information back into the model, to correlate each species of tree to its signature wavelength across the entire study area. Then, she compared maps generated by the model to the data she had gathered in the field, assessing how accurately the model labeled the pixels she knew contained redwoods. “The overall accuracy at Big Basin was 98%, at Muir Woods, it was 96%, and at Jackson, it was 90%,” Francis says. (She suspects the accuracy at Jackson is lower because, with its recent history of logging, its trees tend to be smaller. So, the odds of a “mixed pixel,” containing two or more species, are higher.)

Altogether, Francis’s methods proved that it’s possible to efficiently generate maps of redwood forests across a broad area at an unprecedented level of detail: compared to the 800-meter standard for vegetation and downscaled climate modeling data, Francis’s maps offer a pixel size of just ten meters. “Our resulting high-resolution mapping approach will facilitate improved research, conservation, and management of redwood trees in California,” Francis and her coauthors concluded in a 2019 paper about the map-generating process.

But the species occurrence maps themselves only go so far to help resource managers understand the specific conditions in each grove that make some areas more suitable to redwoods than others. So, in a subsequent paper, published in 2020 in the journal Ecography, Francis layered in a bunch of existing data on fog, precipitation, and soil type, with maps of topography generated from the GAO—including the distance each identified redwood stood from a stream, and the average amount of sunlight that hits a particular spot, based on its aspect and slope. “The goal was to develop new maps of habitat suitability,” which is basically the likelihood that a redwood will be able to survive at all stages of its life cycle in a given spot, “and use them to try to test the hypothesis that habitat suitability varies at finer spatial scales” than most current analyses allow for, Francis says.

“The analysis we did suggests that variation in access to moisture, even across tens of meters, does influence the distribution of redwoods,” Francis says. The results weren’t exactly a surprise: “That’s probably pretty easy to infer if you’ve ever gone on a hike in a redwood forest. I think most people would notice that redwoods grow better closer to streams than up on ridges. But with this study, we had a very large data set to quantify that effect in ways that hadn’t been possible before because that high-resolution data wasn’t available.”

Redwood roots in McCormick Creek at Camp Jones Gulch, photo by Orenda Randuch.

As to why that’s useful, Francis mentioned the headline-grabbing conclusion from Fernandez’s 2015 study: “Using 800-meter resolution data, they found that, by the year 2030, areas south of San Francisco were most likely to become unsuitable habitat for redwoods. That includes all of Big Basin,” Francis says. Her findings suggest that, with adequately detailed data, resource managers can identify pockets of habitat, say, a cool nook down in a creek bed, where redwoods can continue to thrive, even if their neighbors on a sunny ridge nearby wither in the heat or burn away. For organizations like Sempervirens Fund, “the results suggest that it’s still worth it to invest in those areas that look like they might become unsuitable at lower resolution, because they might have these areas, called microrefugia, that actually are great habitat still.”

And Francis contends that there’s plenty of utility in the coarser data that most resource managers have access to. “These lower-resolution analyses can better cover the entire redwood distribution and tell us at a broad scale where climate is becoming unfavorable for redwoods,” she says. “That’s definitely useful information for considering how to manage redwood forests for climate change, and our study doesn’t do that.” Her 2020 study also didn’t attempt any specific predictions about how the present-day habitat suitability she’d mapped could change in the coming decades. “I do think it’s possible, and that’s definitely the next step here,” she says. “But there is a step of translating the variables that are output from a climate model, like temperature and precipitation, into the variables that we know are important to redwoods, like moisture availability, which depends on things like fog and topography.”

Land Team members monitor a protected property, photo by Russell Ferretti-Hoyle.

Back in 2013, Sempervirens Fund developed what it calls the Conceptual Area Protection Plan, or CAPP. This is a digital application that draws on a wide range of geospatial data, including a parcel’s biodiversity, proximity to other protected lands, forest size and condition, and watershed integrity, to prioritize opportunities for land protection and stewardship.

McLendon says Sempervirens Fund continues to update its CAPP with new data, including a recently released database from The Nature Conservancy that identifies locations estimated to harbor the greatest resilience to climate change. McLendon says the CAPP is a useful tool to evaluate potential land conservation opportunities before a site visit and to help maintain a list of priority properties that the organization hopes to protect. But data alone is only part of the story.

“We weigh the data with: What are the practical opportunities that we actually have? We may identify a property as a high conservation priority, but what if the landowner doesn’t want to sell? That’s why we put a lot of effort into cultivating relationships with landowners in the region, so, if and when they decide to sell, they come to us first.”

Forest Stewardship For A Changing Climate

“A lot of our project prioritization, both in acquisition and stewardship, has really shifted since the 2020 CZU wildfires,” McLendon says. She’s encouraged by the ubiquitous sight of redwoods that survived and are resprouting with new growth: “It’s definitely a forest in recovery, but it’s a forest system forever changed,” McLendon says.

Executive Director Sara Barth and Director of Land Conservation Laura McLendon with the redwood tree called "Father of the Forest" in Big Basin Redwoods State Park on September 10, 2020—just weeks after the CZU Fire— photo by Ian Bornarth, and the "Father of the Forest" on April 4, 2023, photo by Orenda Randuch.

Before the fire, land managers throughout the region recognized that many of its forests were choked with flammable debris after more than a hundred years of routine fire suppression, and a legacy of clear-cut logging left vast swathes of dense, crowded forests. But resources for forest management have long been inadequate: In Part 3 of this series, Sempervirens Fund Executive Director Sara Barth explained how, prior to 2020, California State Parks’ controlled burn program at Big Basin was “relatively aggressive” and “way beyond the average level for state parks, and for most other landowners in the region.” Those areas that they’d managed to treat with low-intensity fire seem to have fared better during the big blaze than areas that hadn’t burned, Barth says. But owing to cost, regulations, liability, and a narrow and unpredictable window of acceptable weather conditions for setting management fires, the agency only ever managed to burn what Barth calls a “tiny fraction” of the park’s overall area.

The experience of living through the fire—and seeing the profusion of green growth that’s sprouted from blackened stumps—has galvanized Sempervirens Fund and fellow conservationists throughout the state to focus more energy and resources on managing forests to make them more resilient to fire and other disturbances.

“Going forward, we aim to balance more of our work around proactive restoration, including vegetation management activities like removing shrubs and low plants,” McLendon says. And thinning has benefits beyond creating a more fire-resilient forest: It also allows other important species that share redwood habitat a chance to grow and thrive. On a 107-acre property adjacent to Castle Rock State Park that Sempervirens Fund protected in 2010, the organization studied the ecological effects of such thinning treatments and found that “biodiversity on the forest floor was far greater in areas that were thinned, compared to areas that were not treated,” McLendon says. “Not only the number of plants overall, but the number of different species were far greater in areas that were treated, and that’s just what we’ve seen in the first ten years.”

Laura McLendon checks on a complex old-growth near Castle Rock, photo by A. Blanchard.

The organization is also committed to “reintroducing prescribed fire, which is a low-intensity type of fire that adds nutrients to soil, promotes biodiversity, and lowers the likelihood of future catastrophic fire” by consuming debris before it has the chance to build to hazardous levels, McLendon says.

But how do McLendon and her colleagues know—across the 224,000-acre region in the Santa Cruz mountains, where the organization has focused most of its work—what areas are most in need of restoration forestry?

Following the CZU fires, the organization added to its CAPP a new data lens through which to view the landscape, which McLendon calls “stewardship need.” “Post-fire, a lot of areas were shown to have burned at a pretty high severity,” McLendon says. “That’s left just an insane number of dead and dying trees on the ground,” leaving hazardous conditions for future fire seasons. These areas would benefit from either a controlled burn, which would consume the debris, or having crews come through and chip up or haul out the dead and downed trees. The new “stewardship need” data layer combines information on fire severity with considerations like parcel size, access, and slope, to help pinpoint the areas where restoration is both feasible and most urgent.

Fuzzy green growth on redwoods recovering along a creek at San Vicente Redwoods, photo by Teddy Miller.

San Vicente Redwoods: A Living Laboratory

One place where Sempervirens Fund is test-driving its climate-responsive forest stewardship goals is the 9,000-acre San Vicente Redwoods, which the organization and its partners acquired from a cement manufacturing company in 2011. The forest is a vast patchwork of old-growth and previously logged areas, crossed by eight creeks, and home to important and threatened wildlife, including marbled murrelets, coho salmon, and California red-legged frogs, as well as rare plants, such as the Point Reyes horkelia and Santa Cruz manzanita.

In a highly anticipated milestone for local hikers and mountain bikers, the Land Trust of Santa Cruz County opened the first seven miles of an eventual 38-mile public trail network at San Vicente Redwoods in December. Meanwhile, since its protection in 2011, Sempervirens Fund, Peninsula Open Space Trust, and Save the Redwoods League have carried on the ambitious work of restoring ecological health and function after over a century of interruption from logging, road building, quarrying, and fire suppression.

Endangered coho salmon and steelhead trout fry at San Vicente Redwoods, by Melisa Cambron Perez.

Stewardship corps members from the Amah Mutsun Land Trust have helped thin dense thickets of debris and, with Cal Fire, have reintroduced controlled fire along Empire Grade Road. To help slow the spread of fast-moving wildfires, crews have cut 11 miles of shaded fuel breaks along roads and ridges and have thinned, or have plans to thin, 500 acres throughout the forest. Last year, the partners planted 23,000 redwood seedlings and 900 Douglas firs in areas burned by the CZU fires. Over three years, Sempervirens Fund helped remove invasive clematis vines from creek beds throughout the property. And in 2021, the organization removed a dam that had long blocked salmon from swimming to spawning grounds upstream. Less than a year later, in September 2022, scientists documented the first-ever coho salmon, a federally endangered species, above the former site of the dam.

All these projects support the overall goal at San Vicente of protecting and enhancing existing old growth, while restoring what McLendon calls “old-growth conditions” to previously logged areas of the forest. But what are those conditions, and why the focus on old growth for climate-conscious restoration?

For one thing, older redwoods are more resilient than younger trees to the kinds of challenges the forests will face in a warmer future: more fire, wind, storms, and flooding, McLendon explains. The recently published research from Cal Poly Humboldt redwoods expert Steve Sillett and his coauthors also finds that older redwoods foster more biodiversity than younger ones, and produce more decay-resistant heartwood, which makes them more efficient at storing carbon that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere to contribute to global warming. And, unlike most other tree species, whose growth tends to slow as they age, redwoods keep adding enormous—and increasing—amounts of wood as they age.

“When it comes to carbon storage potential, there is no other tree that does it as well as an old-growth redwood,” McLendon says, echoing the consequential findings of groundbreaking research from Sillett’s lab that were published in the journal Forest Ecology and Management in 2020. In their 2022 study on redwood growth efficiency, Sillett and his coauthors attribute some of the difference in carbon storage capacity between primary (old-growth) and secondary (previously logged) forests to chemical changes throughout a redwood’s lifespan. Wood extracted from trees growing in primary forests was found to have three times more fungus- and pest-resistant chemicals than trees in secondary forests. As a result, older trees add wood more slowly than younger trees, as they shift the balance of their energy from growth to longevity.

A tree core sample, by Vanessa Bertozzi.

“The decay resistance of heartwood may increase during Sequoia development with profound implications for management of non-timber values, especially carbon sequestration and biodiversity,” researchers wrote. In other words, since older trees resist decay better than younger trees, old-growth groves are a better bet for long-term carbon storage. “Its potential to store the most carbon per acre of any forest type in the world is why we elevate the protection of old-growth redwoods,” says McLendon.

As for biodiversity, older trees are more structurally complex than younger ones: They’ve had time to grow limbs that are themselves the size of mature trees, and develop the massive, multi-layered crowns that are home to a whole strange community of plants and animals that thrive hundreds of feet above the forest floor: lichens, ferns, shrubs, berry bushes, heath, and even Douglas firs and pines.

illustration by Jane Kim, Ink Dwell.

Yet today, just 5% of remaining redwoods are in stands that have never been logged. (Of the 10,000 acres of old growth in the Santa Cruz Mountains, about a thousand acres are unprotected—and these thousand acres are Sempervirens Fund’s highest priority for protection in the region.) If left to their own devices, most of the other 95% might eventually regain some of these old-growth characteristics, but that process could take hundreds of years. With help from foresters, that process can be sped along, McLendon explains.

Trees with pink ribbon can be removed so the redwood in the center can grow faster, by Neal Sharma

The idea is to pick a few trees in each grove of previously logged forests and designate them as what McLendon calls “candidate old-growth” trees. Those trees get to stay and keep growing thicker bark, more resistant heartwood, and bigger arms to support more biodiversity in the forest canopy, while many of the surrounding redwoods may be cut down for use as commercial timber, a source of revenue to fund ongoing forest restoration and management. In their 2022 article, Sillett and his co-authors describe this style of restoration forestry as the Potential Elder Tree model, and stress that it could have benefits for managed forests of all types, as old-growth forests are in decline globally. “Promoting and retaining at least a few large trees per hectare can make substantial contributions to forest biodiversity,” they argue. This sort of selective harvest can generate income from timber sales that can be reinvested in forest restoration. And it’s been shown to have huge ecological payoffs: “Not surprisingly, when you do take out some of the competing trees, the ones you leave behind get bigger, faster,” McLendon explains.

“The strategy we’re pursuing at San Vicente Redwoods and many other places where we work is not only to protect those existing groves, but to knit them together through restoration practices by encouraging acceleration of growth in second-growth forests,” McLendon says. “The goal is to have larger continuous old-growth stands. It’ll take a few generations to get there, obviously, but when we’re thinking about massive climate systems and trees with massive lifespans, we think long-term.”

A Plan For Urgent Action To Save Redwoods

All told, the threats facing the region’s redwoods—and the natural and human communities that share their habitat—are daunting, says Sara Barth. “But I know how hard we’re all working to help this species endure, and I’ve seen the progress we’ve already made.” Barth says that the 36,000 acres of forest that generations of Sempervirens Fund supporters have helped protect and restore is just one measure of that progress. So is the network of nonprofits, government agencies, companies, and experts that Sempervirens Fund partners with, and the scientists whose findings are essential to understanding the complex interactions among climate, ecology, and biology that have shaped the forests we know today.

Still, Barth says that everyone who cares about the future of redwoods should be hearing alarm bells right now. The urgent need for action and investment on an unprecedented scale is why Sempervirens Fund is organizing its future work around three ambitious new goals. First, the organization will accelerate its purchasing of land for permanent conservation and protect 7,000 more acres of climate-resilient redwood forests by 2030. Second, through restoration and management, it aims to boost the ability of forests throughout the region to store carbon, capturing an additional 1.1 metric tons of carbon by 2050 that would otherwise contribute to global warming. Finally, Sempervirens Fund is pursuing partnerships and policies to ensure that the State of California meets its goal of protecting 30% of the state by 2030 (up from 24% protected today).

Redwood leaves remove carbon from the air and store it in the tree's wood, by Canopy Dynamics

To help reach these goals, Barth says, Sempervirens Fund is fighting for policies that support climate resilience. The organization advocated for $54 billion in state funding in 2022 to support conservation and protect public lands, parks, and coastline, statewide. And it’s working with lawmakers in Sacramento to restore the $1.3 billion for climate projects that was cut in Governor Newsom’s 2023 budget proposal. Public funding—local, state, and federal—will be key to preparing the state’s forests to withstand climate change. Policy working its way through the California Legislature would finally direct state agencies to prioritize acquisition of conserved lands, beginning in the Santa Cruz mountains—an approach not seen from state conservation agencies for much of the last decade.

But Barth says the most important factor in the organization’s success is the growing community of people who feel a personal connection to the region’s redwoods, and who have given their time, skills, and resources to Sempervirens Fund in return.

“So many of our supporters are keyed in to what’s happening with the region’s forests, and they’re the strongest force behind our goals and plans for the future,” says Barth. “The willingness and concern from our supporters and community to step up and meet this moment are what give me the most hope for the future.”

“The willingness and concern from our supporters and community to step up and meet this moment are what give me the most hope for the future.”

—Sara Barth, Executive Director

Read Part 3

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