Mendocino County may no longer be home to the tallest redwood tree, but it still has "one of the most magnificent redwood forests in Northern California."
That forest is tucked away in Montgomery Woods State Natural Reserve, and is offering a group of scientists a wealth of information about how the huge trees survived the last century, and how they may survive the next.
"We are asking some pretty simple questions: what has happened in the past, and how can we use that information to inform what we do in the future?" said Ruskin Hartley, executive director of the Save the Redwoods League, which recently launched the Redwoods and Climate Change Initiative.
To collect data for the initiative, scientists from the University of California at Berkeley and Humboldt State University are visiting forests across the state, and on Thursday explained how their work is progressing in Montgomery Woods.
"This place is really kind of a fluke," said Bob Van Pelt, a research scientist at Humboldt State, explaining that not only does the forest's cool, foggy weather create ideal conditions for the trees, but a lake that became a swamp helped them flourish. "It's probably the only really old redwood swamp there is, and is probably the reason why there are so many old redwood trees here."
To begin their research, the scientists mapped out a rectangular, one-hectare plot in the forest that
"We've collected data from nine plots in Northern California (including Humboldt Redwoods and Jedediah state parks and Redwood National Park), and we are still looking for the resources to collect data from seven plots south of San Francisco," said Bill Kruse of Kruse Imaging, which is mapping the trees from the air.
"For so many years, this research was just collected from about six feet off the ground," said Hartley, meaning that the scientists worked from where they stood. "This is the first time that people started collecting data from the top down."
But some of the work is still done from the ground, including what may be the most important of all: gathering samples from the tree's core. Because while a tree's height, girth, bark, branches and foliage all give the scientists clues about its health, what the group was really excited about Thursday were isotopes.
"Isotopes are the key to unlocking the tree's secrets," said Todd Dawson, a UC Berkeley professor and board member for Save the Redwoods, explaining that the tree's rings tell scientists how much a tree grew in a year, but the oxygen, carbon and hydrogen isotopes can tell them why.
"The isotopes can not only tell you how much moisture the tree got that year, but whether the moisture was rain or fog," Dawson said, adding that isotopes are collected via the same process as the core samples -- by drilling into the tree with an extractor.
"It doesn't really hurt the tree," he said. "They've seen a lot worse than an incremental borer."
Armed with all that data, Dawson said the scientists can then build climate models, and "predict what the trees will do in response to climate changes and whether they will be endangered."
Another innovation the group is using are probes that can measure how much water each tree drinks.
"No one (now) can give you an accurate measure of how much water a 300-foot tree uses," said Anthony Ambrose, a UC Berkeley scientist.
According to the league, the goal of the initiative is to "create a comprehensive climate adaptation strategy for the redwoods, (focusing) the league's efforts on where to protect and restore redwood forestland according to climate change predictions."
Still recovering from a major fire in 2008, the forest now has "more redwood seedlings than hikers have seen in 40 years, and has gone through a reproductive frenzy," said Steve Sillet of Humboldt State. "The fire created a massive cone crop."
The forest's tallest tree, which is over 112 meters, is not being analyzed by the group, but the second tallest, which stands at 111.6 meters, is. The 112-meter tree was considered the tallest redwood until 2006, when a 115-meter tree was discovered in Redwood National Park.
Justine Frederiksen can be reached at udjjf@pacific.net or 468-3521.
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