Interesting article on assisted migration of redwoods. This idea is starting to catch on. I think the naysayers are a little too fearful—are there any documented negative effects of moving long-lived and slow to reproduce trees to areas that have a long history of biogeographic contact? I am not aware of any. Most invasive species are small, fast to reproduce, and introduced to radically distant ecosystems.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Milarch thought that as the world warmed, the unique conditions in which they thrived — well-drained soil that’s neither too hot nor too cold and that is also fed by water from snow melting upslope — would disappear, eventually leading to the trees’ extinction.
“It’s highly likely that many of the giant sequoias in their current groves may not make it for the next century,” Park Williams, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who focuses on the Western United States, told me.
The Torreya Guardians, as the group called itself, cited evidence that the tree had been pushed to its current southerly location by the glaciers of the last ice age but was in fact better adapted to more temperate conditions than those of Northern Florida.
Beginning in 2016, researchers from the University of Western Australia started releasing a captive-bred swamp tortoise into seasonal wetlands about 200 miles south of its natural range; it is thought that this makes it the first animal species ever relocated to protect it from climate change.
While almost all the old-growth coast redwoods were cut down, the trees continue to grow in about 75 percent of their original range, a narrow strip of coastal land that runs more than 450 miles from Big Sur to just north of the Oregon border.
This regenerative capacity is so robust, in fact, that in some cases it forced early American farmers in California to abandon land they hoped to cultivate, because redwoods wouldn’t stop reclaiming recently cleared fields.
The original article contains 4,548 words, the summary contains 255 words. Saved 94%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!