Posted on 12/04/2023 7:57:00 AM PST by Red Badger
After a devastating conflagration, trees regrow using energy stored long ago
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When lightning ignited fires around California’s Big Basin Redwoods State Park north of Santa Cruz in August 2020, the blaze spread quickly. Redwoods naturally resist burning, but this time flames shot through the canopies of 100-meter-tall trees, incinerating the needles. “It was shocking,” says Drew Peltier, a tree ecophysiologist at Northern Arizona University. “It really seemed like most of the trees were going to die.”
Yet many of them lived. In a paper published yesterday in Nature Plants, Peltier and his colleagues help explain why: The charred survivors, despite being defoliated, mobilized long-held energy reserves—sugars that had been made from sunlight decades earlier—and poured them into buds that had been lying dormant under the bark for centuries.
“This is one of those papers that challenges our previous knowledge on tree growth,” says Adrian Rocha, an ecosystem ecologist at the University of Notre Dame. “It is amazing to learn that carbon taken up decades ago can be used to sustain its growth into the future.” The findings suggest redwoods have the tools to cope with catastrophic fires driven by climate change, Rocha says. Still, it’s unclear whether the trees could withstand the regular infernos that might occur under a warmer climate regime.
Mild fires strike coastal redwood forests about every decade. The giant trees resist burning thanks to the bark, up to about 30 centimeters thick at the base, which contains tannic acids that retard flames. Their branches and needles are normally beyond the reach of flames that consume vegetation on the ground. But the fire in 2020 was so intense that even the uppermost branches of many trees burned and their ability to photosynthesize went up in smoke along with their pine needles.
Trees photosynthesize to create sugars and other carbohydrates, which provide the energy they need to grow and repair tissue. Trees do store some of this energy, which they can call on during a drought or after a fire. Still, scientists weren’t sure these reserves would prove enough for the burned trees of Big Basin.
Visiting the forest a few months after the fire, Peltier and his colleagues found fresh growth emerging from blackened trunks. They knew that shorter lived trees can store sugars for several years. Because redwoods can live for more than 2000 years, the researchers wondered whether the trees were drawing on much older energy reserves to grow the sprouts.
For the study, Melissa Enright of the U.S. Forest Service covered parts of 60 charred tree trunks in black plastic to block out sunlight, ensuring any new sprouts grew only with stored energy, not new sugar from photosynthesis. After 6 months, the team brought the sprouts back to the lab. There, they radiocarbon dated the molecules within to calculate the average age of those sugars. At 21 years, they are the oldest energy reserves shown to be used by trees. (A previous study had clocked 17 years in maples.)
Average age is only part of the story. The mix of carbohydrates also contained some carbon that was much older. The way trees store their sugar is like refueling a car, Peltier says. Most of the gasoline was added recently, but the tank never runs completely dry and so a few molecules from the very first fill-up remain. Based on the age and mass of the trees and their normal rate of photosynthesis, Peltier calculated that the redwoods were calling on carbohydrates photosynthesized nearly 6 decades ago—several hundred kilograms’ worth—to help the sprouts grow. “They allow these trees to be really fire-resilient because they have this big pool of old reserves to draw on,” Peltier says.
It's not just the energy reserves that are old. The sprouts were emerging from buds that began forming centuries ago. Redwoods and other tree species create budlike tissue that remains under the bark. Scientists can trace the paths of these buds, like a worm burrowing outward. In samples taken from a large redwood that had fallen after the fire, Peltier and colleagues found that many of the buds, some of which had sprouted, extended back as much as 1000 years. “That was really surprising for me,” Peltier says. “As far as I know, these are the oldest ones that have been documented.”
Although the redwoods have sprouted new growth, Peltier and other forest experts wonder how the trees will cope with far less energy from photosynthesis, given that it will be years before they grow as many needles as they had before the fire. "They’re alive, but I would be a little concerned for them in the future.”
Another question is how the redwoods would cope if a second catastrophic fire strikes soon. Have they used up their emergency reserves? “The fact that the reserves used are so old indicates that they took a long time to build up,” says Susan Trumbore, a radiocarbon expert at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry. “Redwoods are majestic organisms. One cannot help rooting for those resprouts to keep them alive in decades to come.”
doi: 10.1126/science.zh27a7r
LoL! Can you imagine believing the "regular infernos" idiocy and being worried about trees? I mean humans could possibly have a big problem with "regular infernos" covering the Earth.
Build your underwater survival bunker and say goodbye to the trees, hippie.
NATURE IS AWESOME...!! CUT OFF A OCTOPUS’S ARM..IT GROWS A NEW ONE.
Here is a video I watched just last night- an experienced woodworker turning a
Redwood log on a lathe. I couldn’t stop watching, this guy knows his stuff…..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6L_ajvJXW0
It’s an almost 1/2 hour video, and it’s amazing to watch.
this is what mine looks like:
Written by Bill Harlow. He was about eighty years old when I was there in the 1980s.
SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry @ Syracuse University.
Since they probably change the name four times since you went there, you are forgiven.
My question, why is the a SUNY school at a private University?
One redwood tree will shed six billion seeds in its lifetime. Of the six billion seeds to fall, only one will reach maturity turning into a full-grown redwood.
As designed by nature.
“Mother Nature’s in charge; we’re just along for the ride.” — me, 1996
As designed by God.......................
It is next door to SU on the south side. Between the Carrier Dome and a large cemetery. Where incidentally we did a lot of the tree identification when I took Dendrology. Meaning we walked around the cemetery and the professor taught us how to identify various trees.
SUNY ESF is adjacent to Syracuse University. As is the SUNY nursing school. Another state of NY college right next door to the SU campus. As was the VA hospital and Upstate Med center. It is all right in the SE corner of the city of Syracuse. East of I81. You never went under the highway. That was the hood.
Over the years SUNY ESF was a four year school plus graduate. When I there it was only a Junior/Senior program plus graduate degrees. So, we all went somewhere else for Freshman/Sophmore years. I went to SUNY Morrisville AG & Tech. They changed it back to a four year school after I left. They even built a dorm on the ESF campus. I lived in SU student housing my Junior year. My senior year I lived off campus.
However, I took many courses at SU. All of the marketing classes I took were at SU. I also took many elective classes there including photography, scuba diving, Astronomy, wood/metal arts. I still paid SUNY instate resident tuition.
SUNY then paid the “lab fees” for these elective courses. Even the lab fee for scuba diving. It was about $300. Which was a lot of money back in 1984/85.
So I graduated with dual BS degree certificates. One from SUNY ESF and one from SU. It was the best way to attend a private university and pay about 1/4 of what kids paying for SU paid. As far as I know, that is still the situation.
This is a scale 3D representation of SUNY ESF:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/69/44/69/69446900d2ffc6cf6c83fa7a3332b54b.jpg
Gateway Center, Jahn Lab and Centennial Hall(dorm) were built after I was there. All the tan colored buildings are SU. Lawarinson(20 stories tall) and Sadler Hall were both dorms. Baker lab was where I took most of my classes. The home of Wood Products Engineering(my major).
Where is says Campus map was the north end of the cemetery. It was a huge piece of real estate. About 1 1/2 miles long at least.
True DAT!!
ping
God’s plan for nature gets more wonderful every day.
Still, it’s unclear whether the trees could withstand the regular infernos that might occur under a warmer climate regime.
Those trees have been there for 2000 years or more.
They have lived through ICE AGES and WARM Ages.
They have survived both extremes.
God knows what He’s doing....................
Several years ago I stopped at a friend’s in the St Louis area, and we went to one of the nature preserves they have there outside the city. The guide was talking about all of the endangered native species which appeared after they began controlled burns - especially of invasive species which had overwhelmed part of the area. He pointed out entire slopes of endangered plants which had been thought to be extinct in the area for decades before the burns.
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