Why are redwood trees important

To date, more than albino redwood sites have been identified. The redwood forest tends to inspire creative urges in any and all visitors. Save the Redwoods League enlists volunteers for essential redwood and giant sequoia research through its Citizen Science program.

Participants help League researchers collect data to inform redwood conservation, restoration and climate change. League scientists have determined that western sword ferns are a prime climate change indicator in coast redwood forests, and are now actively monitoring sword ferns through the redwood range. One way to track climate change is by recording shifts in the responses of plants and animals to the seasons.

League scientists are monitoring seasonal shifts in the redwood forest through its Redwoods Phenology Project. Though they are protected by law, threats to established redwood parks and reserves continue. They include illegal logging and marijuana cultivation, and development in adjacent lands. Monitoring of protected forests and protection of contiguous lands is therefore essential. Foresters and sustainable timber producers are essential partners in redwood conservation and restoration.

Rehabilitating logged-over lands requires intensive management, including the thinning of some trees. Such work provides jobs and valuable timber, strengthens ties with local communities and accelerates old-growth characteristics in younger forests.

Both coast redwoods and giant sequoia are members of the cypress family , a large group of trees that includes cypresses and junipers. Relatives of coast redwoods and giant sequoia grow on every continent except Antarctica, ranging from Norway to southernmost Chile. They need well-drained soil to survive, and their shallow root system is highly sensitive to soil compaction.

The roots and soils also bank vast amounts of carbon. Redwood forests can resist many invasive species. Argentine ants have invaded every ecosystem in California except for the redwood forest. One of the most beautiful plants on the redwood forest floor is redwood sorrel Oxalis oregano , a species that appears to wilt in full sunlight. Trillium, a beautiful and distinctive plant of the redwood forest understory, employs a sophisticated propagation strategy. Its seeds are wrapped in a fleshy and appetizing coating called an elaiosome.

Both ants and yellowjackets will collect and move the seeds, eating the elaiosome but not the seed itself, which later sprouts. May and June are the best months to view blossoming rhododendrons and azaleas in the redwood forest. During the bloom, these understory shrubs carpet the floor of many redwood groves in intense, multicolored displays. Many visitors to the coast redwood forest encounter banana slugs Ariolimax columbianus , the largest slug in North America and the second largest in the world.

These gargantuan terrestrial mollusks, that can live for up to seven years, secrete a thick slime that aids them in crawling, deters predators and prevents desiccation. They build soil by breaking down plant materials. Redwood trees are an important food source for black bears Ursus americanus.

Bruins strip bark from young redwoods to get at the sugar-rich cambium, a thin layer of living cells that produces wood. The coast redwood forest supports a number of amphibians, including the rough-skinned newt Taricha granulose , which lives in streams, springs and the forest floor.

Its skin secretes a strong toxin. The California giant salamander Dicamptodon ensatus is one of only two salamanders in the world that vocalizes.

Distinctive for its large size and spotted skin, this amphibian is found in the redwood forests of Mendocino, Sonoma, Napa and Santa Cruz counties. Another amphibious resident of the coast redwood forest floor is the tailed frog, an ancient frog species. This diminutive squirrel has a specialized anatomy uniquely suited for gliding through the redwood canopy.

A parachute-like membrane known as a patagium stretches between their arms and legs, allowing them to soar from one tree to another. Citizen scientists can perform their own research in the redwood forest by performing a transect — walking a sharply delineated route through a portion of forest while taking notes on all observed plants and animals. Such techniques help shape highly accurate biological forest assays.

Save the Redwoods League provides downloadable transect instructions to help young researchers get started. From their leaves, redwoods can release terpenes which help condense moisture in the air into clouds that cool the forest 8. Redwoods can also transpire moisture back into the air to help keep the forest cool and moist during dry months for themselves and the plants around them. You can read more about the role redwoods play in the water cycle here. Entire ecosystems can live within redwood branches high off the ground.

Because redwoods can grow so large and old, their shed leaves collect together with dust and water on their branches and eventually become soil mats that create mini-ecosystems 9. Hundreds of plants including ferns, moss, lichen, huckleberries, and even other full-sized trees have been found living in the canopies of redwoods While many more species of birds and small mammals such as bats and squirrels nest and find food growing on redwoods, some species like wandering salamanders live their entire lives in the canopy of a single redwood tree The redwood forests of the Santa Cruz Mountains are near the end of the largest temperate rainforest in the world which stretches up the north Pacific Coast 13 and supports hundreds of species of wildlife Wild, endangered creatures like mountain lions , Coho salmon and marbled murrelet depend on our local redwood forests to survive.

Wildlife need large, connected areas of diverse habitat to get the food, water, shelter, and potential mates to thrive. Protecting and connecting habitat for wildlife is especially critical for their survival as our communities continue to grow into natural places that once provided them refuge. When we protect habitat for threatened and endangered species, often the most sensitive or specialized creatures, all wildlife in and near the habitat benefit.

While all trees are crucial to maintaining a stable, human-friendly climate, redwoods are climate change heroes. Studies show that coast redwoods capture more carbon dioxide CO2 from our cars, trucks and power plants than any other tree on Earth Thanks to their large size, long lifespan, and rot-resistant wood, redwood trees can pull and hold at least three times more carbon from the air, thereby cleaning more air and helping to keep temperatures from rising, than the average tree More research is being done to see how redwood trees can help to decrease the effects of climate change.

In the meantime, protecting the redwood forests we have now is crucial particularly as the effects of climate change itself including higher temperatures, drought, and much hotter and more frequent wildfires threaten them. As the climate changes, the redwood forests in the Santa Cruz Mountains are one of very few places that can provide a refuge for local plants and animals to survive 19 , because the area has many microclimates, is cooled by coastal summertime fog and is still largely unpaved.

Read more about Redwoods and Climate Change. Once redwoods had a much wider range across the Northern Hemisphere, including western North America and the coasts of Europe and Asia The coastal fog in this area has helped supply enough water to support the redwood giants through all of the seasons 22 for the last 20 million years Although coast redwoods have been established by people in other places of the world like New Zealand 24 , the oldest and tallest coast redwoods are in their natural habitat 25 where they have rain, fog, and forests of neighboring redwoods, fungi, and creatures like banana slugs helping to support them.

Protecting their last remaining natural habitat is crucial so redwoods can reach their full potential as the tallest trees on the planet and our awe-inspiring climate change heroes. The survival of several redwood buildings from the fire in San Francisco launched a flurry of demand for redwood lumber in the rebuilding of the city and elsewhere By , logging spurred a group of concerned people to form Sempervirens Club, now known as Sempervirens Fund, and start the redwood conservation movement which has successfully preserved thousands of acres of redwood forest.

However, there is much more land still at risk. In , the International Union for Conservation of Nature listed redwoods as endangered Today, we have a rare chance to re-establish the once-vast and vibrant local redwood forest into a magnificent, life-giving world between Silicon Valley and the Pacific Ocean.

Although many old-growth redwoods have been cut down, younger second-growth redwoods have resprouted since then, some even of the same genetic stock of their massive predecessors. By protecting redwood forests and helping to restore ideal conditions through careful stewardship , old-growth redwood forests can grow again.

Another way fairy circles can form is when baby redwoods sprout at their parents' base, latching onto their roots for nutrients. Because redwood seeds are so small compared to their mature size, it seems the sprouts don't wander too far from home. And having been lucky enough to see these trees with my own eyes, I can't really blame them.

Although not technically redwoods themselves, Pacific madrone trees, or Arbutus menziesii— sometimes called madrona, bearberry, or strawberry trees—are an important part of redwood forests. These fascinating trees were introduced to me as " refrigerator trees ," so called because of their eternally cool temperature, which I confess I didn't believe in until I tested it out for myself.

Madrone trees are easy to spot: they have smooth orange-red bark that peels and curls as it ages, eventually falling off and leaving its inner bark typically a pale green bare and visible. If you touch these bare spots, no matter how hot the day is, the bark will be cool to the touch.

What we don't seem to know yet is why madrones are cool to the touch. Another theory holds that madrone trees store so much water that their temperature is cooler than the air around them. A hundred years ago, the biggest threat to these incredible trees was logging: of the original redwood range, about a quarter—approximately , acres—was lost forever. Happily, the Save the Redwoods League has since preserved nearly , acres in dozens of redwoods parks and protected redwood forestland on private properties as well.

Nowadays, threats to redwoods include things like climate change, forest fires, and real-estate development. There's also the threat of burl poaching. Burls are hard, knotty growths that form from dormant seedlings on trunks of living trees, and their wood is highly valued for its beauty and rarity. The problem is that, when poachers come and cut off redwood burls, it leaves the tree exposed to infection and disease.

Making matters even worse, burls actually contain infinite promise: if the original tree dies, its burl will blossom , sometimes even going on to become a full-grown redwood tree itself.

But then, in , a series of devastating fires spread across the western U. By , the United States Forest Service had adopted a policy of fire suppression for all fires covering 10 acres or more. The objective was total fire exclusion—keeping all fire out of wildland areas—in order to reduce the loss of resources and minimize firefighting costs.

But fire exclusion brought unintended consequences. When excess vegetation is allowed to grow, it creates the perfect conditions for devastating megafires, which burn faster and hotter and can potentially kill the old-growth trees that would have easily survived smaller fires. Prescribed burning is one way to undo the damage caused by fire exclusion, Campbell says. Forest managers set these fires under tightly controlled conditions that take into account things like public safety, weather, and specific objectives for the trajectory and end goals of the fire.

Prescribed burning has been practiced in the giant sequoia forests since the s, when the ecologist Harold H. But when the blaze entered the Redwood Mountain giant sequoia grove —a part of the park that had been subject to a controlled burn a few years prior—it became less intense and crews were able to contain it. The coast redwoods face a different set of circumstances, though, says Kristen Shive, director of science for Save the Redwoods League.

Fire exclusion has not been as harmful for these forests, she says, because the climate is wetter. In a paper published in the Open Journal of Forestry, environmental studies professor Will Russell and his colleagues at San Jose State University wrote that active forest management of the coast redwoods might not be necessary. Because old-growth forests are complex systems full of trees of varying ages, the authors argued that Russell and his coauthors had overestimated how quickly a second-growth forest, where most of the trees are of similar age, could achieve an old forest structure.

Russell says that he and his students have since collected additional data that further bolsters his earlier findings.