The State of the Trees · Episode 6 of 13 · 20 min
The Giants and the Oaks: California's Toughest and Most Fragile Trees
California's most iconic trees are on opposite trajectories that teach the same lesson about resilience and its limits. The coast redwood resprouted after the 2020 CZU fire from dormant buds under its bark, while the giant sequoia cannot resprout and is being killed outright by megafire. The oaks fare badly too: coast live oak and tanoak hollowed by sudden oak death, and blue oak woodland down more than 40 percent in thirty years.
Where it happens
- Big Basin Redwoods State Park, CaliforniaMore than 97 percent burned in the 2020 CZU fire; redwoods resprouted
- Sierra Nevada, California+6 more episodesAbout 70 groves of giant sequoia
- Central Valley foothills, CaliforniaBlue oak woodland losing seedlings
- Central coast, CaliforniaSudden oak death emerged in the 1990s
Timeline
- 1850sIndustrial logging begins removing about 95 percent of old-growth coast redwood
- 1990sSudden oak death emerges on the California central coast
- August 2020CZU Lightning Complex burns Big Basin
- 2020-2021Castle, KNP Complex and Windy fires kill large share of giant sequoias
- December 2023Redwood recovery findings published in Nature Plants
Still debated
The contrast between a fire-resilient redwood and a fire-doomed sequoia is mechanistic rather than contradictory: redwood resprouts from a bud bank, sequoia cannot.
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