radiata pine

Our Local, Endangered Pine Species

Monterey pine (Pinus radiata) is an extraordinarily valuable endangered species that has received insufficient conservation recognition. The stand of pines around Año Nuevo have been heavily impacted by wildfire but are regenerating well (for now). Meanwhile, much of the Monterey pine stand on the Monterey Peninsula is effectively gone. Cambria’s Monterey pine forest has likewise been compromised. In both cases, while there is what appears to be Monterey pine forest in and among homes, those trees are what are termed ‘relictual’ – without fire, they will not regenerate and no one is suggesting that prescribed fire be used in neighborhoods to manage those forests to perpetuate them as they would naturally need to be. In an ideal world, homeowners in Cambria and on the Monterey Peninsula would be so interested in conservation that they would participate in an expensive program to replant older pines with enough genetically appropriate seedlings as to maintain those populations, but we have too little leadership, interest, and funding to support that kind of initiative. My hope is this becomes a reality. The first step is to build awareness and interest. Your job is to help tell this story to increase support for the protection of this pine. The next step is to gain State legal protection of this endangered species.

Timber Importance

Monterey pine is an enormously important tree for producing timber around the globe. Some of my advisors suggest I start any argument for conservation in the economic realm, and so I start here. If you are going to discuss this tree in this context, the first thing you need to do is to use the correct terminology, starting with the right name for the tree. Call the timber tree ‘radiata pine.’ That’s because it has been so intensively bred as to be easily distinguished from its wild counterpart.

10 million acres of radiata pine occur in timber plantations, mostly in Australia, New Zealand, Spain, and Chile.

As the effects of climate change intensify, it will become increasingly important to maintain and adapt the genetics of radiata pine. While there is some genetic diversity already embedded in plantation radiata pines, there will inevitably be a need for wild genes to augment the plantation trees. And so, conservation of the wild populations becomes important even to the timber industry. Because the wild populations are distant enough from each other, each population has unique attributes that would be important for the health of radiata pine for future timber production.

The Five Pine Populations                           

There are five wild Monterey Pine stands, three in California and two in Baja, Mexico: Año Nuevo, Monterey, Cambria, Cedros Island, and Guadalupe Island. The Año Nuevo stand is the largest, growing from southern San Mateo County in the north to near Bonny Doon Road in the south. The Monterey stand is bounded to the north by Highway 68 and then into the northern Big Sur to the south. The Monterey stand occupies a series of ancient marine terraces, each with very different soils, an ‘ecological staircase’ with each terrace supporting very different biotic communities. As you move up the staircase, the pines become increasingly short-statured due to age of the soils increasing and, therefore, the soil fertility decreasing.

The population in and around the town of Cambria. There are also two very odd populations on islands to the west of Baja California. Cedros Island is 14 miles offshore of central Baja and Guadalupe Island is 130 miles offshore of northern Baja Mexico. The Guadalupe Island population has historically been highly threatened by goat grazing, but goats have been recently controlled and now there is hope. The Cedros Island population fares better. The two Baja populations of Monterey pine stand out in having only 2 needles per bundle as opposed to the 3-needle bundles from the other populations.

Local Importance, Local Threats

Superficial consideration might suggest that Santa Cruz County’s Año Nuevo stand of Monterey pine is well protected, but there are important issues to consider which might lead to different conclusions. This stand of endangered pines is the largest and much of it is located on property where the owners are amenable to good stewardship. And, this stand is also likely the origin of the plantation ‘radiata pine,’ and so contains the historical suite of genes that have been so important to forestry. This location is the only one where Monterey pine hybridizes with another species – knobcone pine. Sometimes, people refer to ‘hybrid vigor,’ and breeders once saw that expressed from trees grown from Año Nuevo stock in their trials as they selected the best trees for plantations.

Although the Año Nuevo stand has strong potential for conservation, there is no plan to guide that conservation and no leadership in convening and focusing that stewardship. An invasive pathogen, pine pitch canker, has the potential to continue spreading, killing up to 80% of the trees. Other pathogens will no doubt be introduced due to carelessness in regulating global trade; those pathogens will likely be spread along recreational trails and roads through the population. There is also the issue of fire…

The 2020 CZU Lightning Complex Fire raged through most of that population spurring (in patches) a whole new generation of trees. How frequently will the stand burn is an important question – too frequently and the pine may be unable to persist for many more generations.

Fire Adaptation

For millions of years, the distribution and health of Monterey pine has been shaped in a dance between fire and fog. Not too long ago, Monterey pine circled the Monterey Bay, but it has persisted only in the foggiest and most fire-free areas. With climate change, wildfire is expected to increase in frequency and intensity. The 2020 fire left large numbers of dead pines and other trees standing; those present a massive fuel load for subsequent fire(s). With so much fuel loading and anticipated increased fire frequency, I am concerned that fires will become too frequent and intense for adequate regeneration of Monterey pines. For those of you who want to view a now very rare healthy and diverse Monterey pine forest, I strongly recommend that you visit the very few remaining areas very soon.

Where to Go                                                                            

While it will be instructive to see how Monterey pines are regenerating from fire at the Año Nuevo stand, it is perhaps more enjoyable to see mature stands near Monterey. Within the Año Nuevo stand, you can see post fire regeneration by gazing into the forest along Highway 1 at Waddell Creek beach. If/when BLM opens its northern trails at the Cotoni Coast Dairies, visitors will be able to glance one of the southern-most patches of the Año Nuevo stand of Monterey pine is on a hillock above those trails. Near Monterey, the Huckleberry Hill nature preserve is worth seeing as is Point Lobos State Park and Jack’s Peak park.

What You Can Do

In 1999, the California Native Plant Society petitioned the State of California to list the species as Threatened; the State however refused to consider the petition due to lack of staff resources/time/money to adequately process the petition. This example joins a plethora of other similar situations: the State of California needs citizen support to allocate the necessary funding to list deserving species as Threatened or Endangered so that they will be adequately protected at the local level. We should all be writing to the California governor and our local state assembly and senator members to ask for increased budget and attention to promulgating and analyzing listing petitions for species including the Monterey pine. Here are the contact emails: Governor Newsom, Senator Laird, and North County Assemblymember Gail Pellerin or  South County Assemblymember Robert Rivas.

-this article orginally published in my weekly column at BrattonOnline.com, where Bruce Bratton’s team updates our community about local issues from experts who tirelessly track such things. Thanks Bruce!

Chalks Chaparral

– this is another reprint from my post to Bruce Bratton’s most insightful brattononline.com weekly.

The Chalks stretches from above Año Nuevo into Big Basin south through the Lockheed property and then down many tiny ridges above Scott Creek and the Swanton community. Even before the CZU Fire, the ridges appeared from afar curiously white, like chalk. The earliest Old World explorers wrote in their log books about that striking whiteness. The barren white ridges are on account of extremely poor soil, mostly fractured rock. that limits the ability for vegetation to thrive. The vegetation that can make it is a unique type of chaparral.

Most people see The Chalks on their drive south on Highway One just north of Año Nuevo, South of Franklin Point as they pass the Coastanoa Resort. Look inland and you’ll see lots of broken ridges: those are The Chalks.

Much of The Chalks is on private property. Some is on what is known as “Lockheed Martin Space Systems” at the very end of Empire Grade. That area also contains a 1000-acre private property called “Lehi Park” a recreational and camping spot owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. For public visitation, you’ll have to wait until Big Basin opens again…it’s still closed due to the last big fire. Meanwhile, you must settle for viewing from afar.

The Pines

At the top of the steep and erosive bluffs north of and above Waddell Creek, wind-blown, lichen strewn Monterey Pines form the chalks chaparral overstory, but their genes might make them something other than pure Monterey Pines. This is the home of one of only five native Monterey Pine stands. The others are on the Monterey Peninsula, around Cambria, and on two islands off of Baja – Cedros and Guadalupe. Monterey pines are the most planted forestry tree in the world, and the seeds of the ‘radiata pine’ created bred for those forestry plantings came from the Año Nuevo stand, where Monterey pine hybridizes with knobcone pine. Monterey pine occurs lower in elevation, and more deeply in frequent thick fog; Knobcone pine is found higher and hotter and dryer. In between, there are pines that look like both, and the globally planted forestry tree looks like one of those tweeners. As the birthplace of this confusing but useful forestry tree, The Chalks has its tree ambassador planted by the millions, all over the world. And yet, this tree isn’t the only famous bit of Chalks botany…there are also some world-famous manzanita species.

The Manzanitas

Chalks Chaparral includes 7 species of manzanitas, and there are two common, more widespread ones that dominate and two very rare species that only occur in this habitat. The most common species is brittle leaved manzanita, a widespread burl-forming species, and the subject of a previous essay. The other common species is the sensitive manzanita. Sensitive manzanita has small roundish shiny dark green leaves, making it look like the boxwood of the chaparral. Mixed in with these two species, there are two other manzanita species- two which exist nowhere else in the world: Ohlone manzanita and Schreiber’s manzanita. Each of these locally endemic manzanitas are very uncommon even in The Chalks and grow entirely on private property, so you can’t visit them outside of the UCSC Arboretum’s Conservation Garden. There might be as few as 100 Ohlone manzanita plants in the entire world!

You can, however, view photos of Shreiber’s manzanita from a 1939 expedition that led to its discovery. One photo archived by UC Berkeley shows a big manzanita surrounded by knobcone pines and chamise. Another photo has an overview of the habitat showing the large amount of bare ground with sparse manzanitas, pines and few oaks; that 1935 photo suggests a fire as recent as 14 years previously. The next fire was to be 8 years later in 1948.

You might be wondering about the other three manzanitas you can find on The Chalks. They are: Santa Cruz manzanita, silver leaf manzanita, and the crinite manzanita. On a rare California Native Plant Society field trip through the Lockheed property in the 1990s, we saw all 7 species within a short walk of one of our stops.

The Trails and Views

The best places to access The Chalks are in Big Basin State Park, now closed because of the CZU Lightning Complex Fire…but, put those trails on your list when it reopens. Whether from the coast or from inland, your destination are the ridges around Chalk Mountain. The trails wind on ridgelines with gorgeous views of the ocean overlooking Año Nuevo Island and a vast expanse of the ocean. On a clear day, you can see Point Reyes and the Farallon Islands to the north and Point Sur to the South.

Another place to aim for is Eagle Rock out of Little Basin. Eagle Rock is an isolated bit of sandstone on the eastern flank of The Chalks. The views from Eagle Rock expand eastward more than you might see from Chalk Mountain. The trail goes through a kind of chaparral closely allied to The Chalks, but with less rock showing than elsewhere.

Fires and Seeds

Both the 2009 and 2020 wildfires spread initially through The Chalks chaparral, same as the 1948 Pine Mountain fire. Those watching the 2009 fire said they saw what looked like fire tornados launching from one ridge and igniting the next ridge down wind. No one was watching for the more recent fire, which spread even more quickly. Both fires triggered fire-following seeds to germinate.

The most widespread and obvious fire following seedlings are bush poppies. Most of The Chalks will still be barren next summer (as before the fire), but patches of chest high blue-green bush poppy shrubs will be flowering with their bright yellow flowers next summer. I have tried everything to germinate those bush poppy seeds, including the recommended soak in white gasoline, presumably to break down its seed coat. But, after the fire…seedlings pop up all over.

The Chalks and the Rare Human Animal

Humans are rare in The Chalks. The Lockheed facility had, at its peak, hundreds of employees visiting this chaparral regularly, for work. But then much of it burned, and it is unclear if they will continue to operate the facility in the future. The Lehi property is also mostly ephemerally visited by people. The most common place to find humans in The Chalks had been out Last Chance Road where a culture all its own had homes sprinkled around patches of beautiful chaparral. That community, also, burned in the CZU Lightning Complex Fire.

Much of what we know about the natural history of places is gleaned by humans who make habits of visiting those places and looking carefully at what’s around them. Historically, few people have wandered into The Chalks with an eye to natural history. Shreiber’s 1930’s era Chalks visit mentioned above highlighted the area to natural history enthusiasts with the discovery of a new manzanita species (and those intriguing photographs!). Then there’s Jim West, a botanist extraordinaire endemic to the Swanton area, who has brought The Chalks to the attention of many other naturalists, in part because of his discovery of the other new manzanita species. His work has led to a kind of Chalks revival with a new focus on vegetation mapping bringing a host of new naturalists’ attention to that area. There is much more to be discovered in The Chalks – who will be the next person to find something amazing up there? Post fire recovery may have many surprises…