Sierra Nevada forests are vital for California's water supply and wildlife, but are under siege from drought, beetles and climate change. Can scientists use drought-surviving trees to build more resilient forests?
The sugar pine, with its foot-long cones and feathery branches that stretch out high above the forest, used to be one of the most common trees standing guard over Lake Tahoe’s clear waters. But drought, bark beetles and climate change have ravaged this beloved conifer, whose population was already diminished by logging, development and other human activities.in California, most of them conifers in the Sierra Nevada.
Arturo Garcia of the California Conservation Corps plants sugar pine seedlings as part of the “assisted regeneration” of the trees near Lake Tahoe.Maloney calls her push to replant Tahoe’s forests with the progeny of local drought survivors “assisted regeneration.” It’s a play off the term “assisted migration,” the idea that we should relocate species that are unable to adapt quickly enough to climate change, such as moving animals to higher ground or colder waters.
“Natural selection is a powerful force and we are all trying to work to speed up adaptation through natural selection,” said Sally Aitken, a professor of forest genetics at the University of British Columbia. “The raw material of natural selection is genetic diversity. Increase diversity and you increase the chances of survival. It’s a way of hedging your bets.
She began planning the replanting project while California was still in the throes of an exceptionally dry spell. On one recent morning near Kings Beach, UC Davis scientists joined with two crews of the California Conservation Corps to plant hundreds of the seedlings, scooping them from the bed of a truck into planting bags slung over their shoulders.
The 1859 discovery of the Comstock Lode in Virginia City, Nev., sparked a silver rush and a logging boom, with trees felled and ferried by raft, water flume and rail to supply lumber to the mines. Loggers cut down so many sugar pines,Many have also been killed by white pine blister rust, a fungus introduced from Europe a century ago.
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