California’s towering redwoods face uncertain future, report says

Guy Kovner, THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

Millions of people venture into California’s redwood forests to tilt their heads and behold the giants that stand taller than a football field set on end, can live for more than 2,500 years and form the backbones of coastal woodlands from Big Sur to southern Oregon.

At Armstrong Redwoods State Natural Reserve near Guerneville, the 308-foot Colonel Armstrong tree stands so tall that earthbound admirers can’t see the behemoth’s uppermost 100 feet.

But it and the other old-growth redwoods of equal majesty are essentially relics, comprising a mere 7 percent of the 1.6 million acres of the coastal redwoods, a species that flourished throughout the Northern Hemisphere during the age of dinosaurs and is now found nowhere else on Earth but the California-Oregon coast.

Just over 90 percent of the redwood forests are relatively slender second-growth trees that sprouted within the last 20 to 100 years and, unlike their massive elders, face a perilous future of more frequent and intense wildfires brought on by climate change.

“That was jaw-dropping to us,” said Emily Burns, director of science for Save the Redwoods League, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that has worked to protect and restore redwoods since 1918. “We saw there wasn’t much old growth left.”

Burns is a co-author of the league’s 52-page study, “State of Redwoods Conservation Report,” assessing the health of redwoods after a two-century onslaught from commercial logging, development, road building and agriculture, as well as fire suppression.

The remnants of old-growth forest, found mostly in Humboldt and Del Norte counties, “remain as islands of isolated forests surrounded by degraded and fragmented landscapes” of second-growth forests germinated in the wake of clear-cutting that started in the mid-19th century, the report said.

Throughout the redwood region, there are only 113,000 acres of old growth, representing about 5 percent of the original 2.2 million acres of tall trees on the land before the California gold rush. Some 600,000 acres of redwood forest have since been lost to sawmills.

In Sonoma County, where logging the redwood giants along the Russian River began in 1836, there are 143,377 acres of redwoods, including 9,037 acres of old growth, most located on private property.