Pick up your roots and run north now! Coastal redwoods need to shift about 200 kilometers northwest over the next 10-20 years to survive seasonal changes associated with global climate change. For now, eviction notices apply only to the redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) in the southern end of their range in the Santa Cruz Mountains and Big Sur regions. But some of these redwoods are 300 foot tall old folks who were babes when the Roman Empire flourished. Redwoods in Big Basin State Park near Santa Cruz are among the 5 percent old growth remaining of the 200 million acres of redwoods existing along the California coast prior to commercial logging in the 1850’s.
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The Go North Mandate for coastal redwoods results from computer model research conducted by Lara Kueppers with the Sierra Nevada Research Institute and grad students at UC Merced. (Sorry, the full study is behind a paywall and only the abstract is available at the link.) Studying the effects of climate change on this narrow belt of coastal redwoods that stretches from Big Sur in the south to just over the Oregon border in the north has been difficult because the coastal climate is strongly influenced by the Pacific Ocean’s unique effects on temperature and climate.
Kueppers notes, “Usually, models use down-scaled global predictions, but the coastal climate is harder to predict because it’s such a narrow strip of land that is strongly affected by the ocean.” To model near-future changes in this unique habitat, researchers used the past century’s record of years with exceptional weather to make predictions about future redwood habitat, because what is now exceptional will be normal in the coming 10 to 20 years.”
Obviously, this isn’t a mandate to dig up and move trees. But is it a mandate to prepare a welcoming habitat further northwest and plant new groves of redwoods in the areas identified to be more suitable habitat in 20 years? Most redwood restoration now focuses on conserving and repairing existing redwood forest, but perhaps efforts need to shift to plan for the future areas suitable for redwoods.
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