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Ancient redwoods recover from fire by sprouting 1000-year-old buds
Science.Org ^ | 1 DEC 20235:55 PM ET | BY ERIK STOKSTAD

Posted on 12/04/2023 7:57:00 AM PST by Red Badger

After a devastating conflagration, trees regrow using energy stored long ago

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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


TOPICS: Agriculture; Gardening; History; Outdoors
KEYWORDS: ecoterrorism; ecoterrorists; globalwarminghoax; greennewdeal; redwood; redwoods; sequoia
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To: telescope115

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…..

I read that as “experienced woodpecker” and was wondering how the heck Woody turned the lathe on?


41 posted on 12/04/2023 1:05:49 PM PST by ro_dreaming (Who knew "Idiocracy", "1984", "Enemy of the State", and "Person of Interest" would be non-fiction?)
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To: Red Badger

How does a seedling from a 300-foot tall tree, in a stand of 300-foot-tall trees, manage to find sunlight? Unless some of those trees disappears before it sprouts, it probably won’t. That’s why seeds of the redwood (& sequoia) are bound in the cone by resin. If there’s fire, the resin melts and the seed falls to the ground. If the seed finds purchase, and if enough of the taller trees were killed back by the fire, it has a chance to survive.

Fire isn’t just something they “recover” from, it’s elemental to their life cycle.


42 posted on 12/04/2023 5:40:48 PM PST by Paal Gulli
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To: woodbutcher1963

Hey Stumpie!! ;)


43 posted on 12/04/2023 6:41:15 PM PST by ViLaLuz (2 Chronicles 7:14)
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To: woodbutcher1963

1985 Alumni
...........

I was at SU then. We might have passed each other on M Street!


44 posted on 12/04/2023 6:42:39 PM PST by ViLaLuz (2 Chronicles 7:14)
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To: ViLaLuz

What was the place that served beer on Friday night in a fish bowl?


45 posted on 12/04/2023 7:58:55 PM PST by woodbutcher1963
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To: woodbutcher1963

I vaguely remember that. I think that place was on Adams Street? It had a dance floor with 80s music. Then there was that Rathskellar place down in a basement. Didn’t go out much. Too much homework and work— as a full time student I also worked for the Institute for Energy Research, campus security, Dome concessions, the DeWitt Mall, proctored tests and was in the Navy Reserve. But I fondly remember falafel at King David’s in M Street, and Cosmo’s Pizza. There’s now a King David’s where the Fayetteville Mall used to be that I try to visit whenever I’m out that way.


46 posted on 12/04/2023 10:17:59 PM PST by ViLaLuz (2 Chronicles 7:14)
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To: ViLaLuz

I worked in events production at the dome for two years.
Setting up the outdoor tailgate area prior to football games and then taking it down when the game starts.
I also set up for all the concerts there. Then worked security on several.

When Springsteen came there I worked 24 hours straight after the second concert.
Taking down all the stuff and then setting up for the Georgetown basketball game the next day.

I lived my first year in what we called Skybox apartments at the south campus. On the south side of Manley Field House.
I lived my senior year in an old crappy house on Fellows Ave. It was out Euclid Ave east of campus.

I think the place that served beer in a fish bowl was in the Marshall mall.
It was on the second floor.
I just remember the line for the bathroom was always long.
Guys would eventually piss in the sink, trash can, whatever just to spend up the process.


47 posted on 12/05/2023 3:45:31 AM PST by woodbutcher1963
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To: woodbutcher1963

Wow this is a blast from the past. I manned a Dome concession stand selling memorabilia during basketball games and such. Remember when the snow collapsed the Dome? What a mess. I too lived on Euclid Ave. by Fellows Ave. It got burglarized once. What a small world. Do you remember the mysterious white bicycle that would show up at random places? Or the Rabbi evangelist with his Sukkah Mobile that went around blasting klezmer music? LOL!!!


48 posted on 12/05/2023 10:11:52 AM PST by ViLaLuz (2 Chronicles 7:14)
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77 topics (duplicates out) in the Redwood, Redwoods, and Sequoia keywords (sorted excerpt below).

49 posted on 12/05/2023 10:37:40 AM PST by SunkenCiv (Putin should skip ahead to where he kills himself in the bunker.)
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To: ViLaLuz

I remember when the Dome roof ripped and deflated. It touched the floor of the field.
I was always amazed what a 2 PSI difference made.

I started in my junior year setting up chairs on the floor of the Dome for a Dead concert. That was the worst job in events production. I only did that once. It killed your lower back. After that it was setting up the staging. We gave setting up chairs to new kids.

For the Springstein shows me and another guy got paid to sleep in the Dome between the shows at night to make sure nobody screwed around with the instruments between the two shows. I got Bruce’s harmonica and some guitar picks. The other guy I was with got the hand written set play list written by Bruce. That piece of memorabilia is probably worth something today. Best $5/hour job I ever had.

I watched that first show from one of the speaker stands in the back of the floor. The second one I watched from the luxury box. Then worked until we got the basketball game set up for the next afternoon.

I saw several shows standing right in front of the stage. With ear plugs in of course. I remember standing right in front of Gerry Garcia for one show. We hired the SU football team to stand between the front row and the stage.

I also remember standing on the floor and for a BB game between SU and Georgetown. Patrick Ewing walked right past me. He was an incredible human specimen up close. Rony Seikaly looked small compared to him. Rony was the hardest working player on that team when I was there. He practiced free throws for hours every day. I was 5’ 10” back them. His waist came up to my armpits. Rony was actually a good guy.

So was the star football player Tim Green. He and I were in a computer class together. He was very smart. He graduated with a 4.0 GPA and was the Captain of the football team.
He wrote over 40 books after his NFL career. Now he is in a wheel chair with ALS.

I also remember when Prince and Sheena E came to play there.
Prince was MAYBE 5’ tall and he was wearing 5” heels.
He did not want anything to do with us college boys. He had probably six huge body guards with him.
Who we all wanted to meet and see up close was Sheila E. She was smoking hot.

Did you ever meet or know anyone who knew Vennesa Williams?
The closest anyone I knew ever got to her was the Penthouse foldout picture we had on our fridge. That had to be the best selling Penthouse issue ever in Syracuse.

I do not remember the bicycle or Rabbi.

We lived in the third house on the left on Fellows Ave after you turned south off of Euclid. It was a dump. Senior year my Kawasaki KZ 650 was parked out front a lot.

One of the guys I shared that house with lives on the north side of Fellows Ave. He got a job as an engineer out of college and stayed in the area. He actually hired one of our other room mates too, but he lives down on LI.

I have not been back to SU in several years. My mom still lived in Orchard Park(home of the Bills) until her death three years ago. I stopped once with my son to show him the campus and my old stomping grounds. That was probably eight years ago. After we sold Moms house there was no more reason to go to NYS.

Regards
Jim
WE R SU


50 posted on 12/05/2023 11:12:25 AM PST by woodbutcher1963
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To: woodbutcher1963

I remember the concerts you mention. Also Davie Bowie the Fame concert and Pink Floyd, which I attended. Also Rony Seikaly. He liked me and would speak with me whenever I saw him. Nice guy. I didn’t know that about Tim Green, how tragic. Our apartment was just a few houses around the corner from you on Euclid. I had the crappy little yellow Renault LeCar. They called it the lawnmower, Columbo would have been proud LOL! I took my adult children there a few years back to show them. It’s so different. Part of Greek Row on Comstock Ave was torn down and now there’s a big parking garage. One summer I rented the basement from the Red House fraternity there. What a dump. From there I went into the Navy full time. Thanks for sharing all the Syracuse memories. I still own a house in Rome and go back and forth between there and Philadelphia, but hardly go to Syracuse anymore. It’s gone downhill like many of the other cities in upstate NY.


51 posted on 12/05/2023 1:47:17 PM PST by ViLaLuz (2 Chronicles 7:14)
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To: woodbutcher1963

Oh yeah! I forgot about Vanessa Williams. She was in my school, Crouse College School of Visual and Performing Arts in the drama program (I was an industrial design major). We had a party for her after she was selected for Miss America.

Do you remember when it snowed in the middle of June? I forget which fraternity rang the bells in the Crouse College bell tower but one of the brothers ran up there and was playing Jingle Bells LOL! I was also friends with the guy that wore the Syracuse Orange mascot costume. Once after a game he was walking back to his fraternity in costume and a bunch of “youths” from the bricks started chasing him down the hill LOL!


52 posted on 12/05/2023 1:54:42 PM PST by ViLaLuz (2 Chronicles 7:14)
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To: ViLaLuz

(I was an industrial design major).
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

That’s what I would have gotten my degree in if I could do it all over again...


53 posted on 12/05/2023 2:01:08 PM PST by Yardstick
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To: Yardstick

You dodged a bullet. I ended up not pursuing that career, but many of my classmates went on. As they became senior employees for their corporations they were treated very poorly and practically discarded or driven out, undercut for lower salaried crappy designers from overseas.


54 posted on 12/05/2023 2:07:46 PM PST by ViLaLuz (2 Chronicles 7:14)
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To: ViLaLuz

I can believe it. I was talking the other day with a guy whose company had totally outsourced its industrial design operations. Seems like it could be fun work with the right company and the right projects though.


55 posted on 12/05/2023 2:26:38 PM PST by Yardstick
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To: Ezekiel

It still bears saying, that dude was a total maniac.

But people worked for him anyway...


56 posted on 12/05/2023 2:31:02 PM PST by OKSooner ("You won't like what comes after America." - Leonard Cohen.)
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To: Yardstick

Yeah it’s too bad. I love industrial design but these days it’s a tough career. The problem is most don’t understand good design—industrial, graphic or otherwise.


57 posted on 12/05/2023 2:39:18 PM PST by ViLaLuz (2 Chronicles 7:14)
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To: ViLaLuz

Seems like ID would be a nice blend of artistic and technical. It would take a certain kind of mind to work up a design that’s appealing to the senses as well as functional and manufacturable.


58 posted on 12/05/2023 3:39:07 PM PST by Yardstick
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To: Yardstick

IDs are the blending force between artists and engineers with a focus on the human factor. For me the most impressive technology currently is 3D printers and the advancement of computer-based design and production. I’m old school and thankful for that but CAD is a marvel.


59 posted on 12/06/2023 5:34:00 PM PST by ViLaLuz (2 Chronicles 7:14)
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To: ViLaLuz

Well put and you’re right about the CAD design and 3D printing, both of which I’ve had a chance to use extensively on a personal project of mine. Being able to crank out prototypes and iterate on a design in near real time is amazing. And what’s wild is you can buy a surprisingly capable 3D printer these days for just a few hundred bucks. I eventually want to injection mold my design but for now I’m running a bank of three printers to make parts. The print quality is good enough that they come across as a “real” product and the response I’ve gotten from buyers so far has been good...


60 posted on 12/06/2023 8:42:02 PM PST by Yardstick
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