Catch Up #3 - Cedar -

Watching major die offs of our stands of thirty to forty year of firs, gave us more than pause.  There was no way to avoid wondering and asking “what’s next?”.  The answer came soon – and it surprised and unnerved us. 

In 2016 a professor friend from a nearby university and I discussed where in the forest we should meet up.  When he suggested meeting “up by the big, dead cedars”, I replied “what big, dead cedars?”.   The die off started in one or two of our oldest (250 years), biggest (up to 4 feet) cedars in a large, diverse stand we call the Wildwood.  Of any part of our forests, we assumed that this would be the most resilient and adaptable to all forms of stress.   Think again.  Within a year, ten to fifteen of these grandparent trees has lost all signs of green and within two years the count rose to over thirty.  Donning our “do the right thing” hats, we wondered “what should we do now”.  On the one hand, the trees contained large amounts of lovely and valuable wood, which argued for logging, milling and giving the wood a second life.  But on the other hand, there is no such thing as “waste” in a natïve forest and there were good ecological reasons to let the dead trees decay and add to the forest’s health.  In line with our larger need to balance ecology and budgets, we have split the difference, salvaging some of the highest quality trees while leaving others.  Wood from the trees now add beauty and function in many homes – and the weathering snags are now home to many forest creatures.

The next logical question was, of course, “why did these old and long-lived trees die?”.  We are fortunate to have relationships with a range of “’ologists”.  They came with open minds and a wide range of knowledge, experience and specialized tools.  Their careful work resembled that of investigators working to solve a human death.  Disease? Insects? Changing conditions?  All possible explanations were on the table.

Long story short – over five years later, the answer appears to be clear.  Because the death of our cedar were a tiny part of a much larger pattern impacting in forests from northern California into British Columbia, a major, collaborative research project has been organized and successfully advanced.  Instead of the cause of death being the butler, in the pantry, with a butter knife, the cedars were killed by high temperatures stressing the trees beyond their ability to survive.  Summaries are available here.

As we continue to work in the forest, amid various forms of die offs, we are struck by a difference.  In the areas where the young fir died, the forest is essentially gone, challenging us to reestablish a forest that will hopefully be more resilient.  In contrast, a visitor entering the area where the cedar died today will have no doubt that it is still a healthy, if changed, forest.  Like a colorful tapestry losing one color of thread, this stand made up of over six species of trees, has the traits needed to endure as a functioning forest, in spite of the loss of many cedars.  The resilient and adaptable forest remains.

And we remain – with the opportunity to learn from the lessons that the forests teach us.

Here are four lessons from the cedar die off:

1 – Don’t falsely assume that just because trees are large and relatively old that they will be less vulnerable to stresses such as rising temperatures.

2 – Learn to be more observant and spend more time paying attention to the forests.  While we initially wondered what caused some cedars to thrive while others rapidly died, we now understand the critical role that soil quality and depth play.  Trees died in areas where shallow soils caused poor root development, which reduced the trees’ ability to adapt to high summer temperature stress.

3 – And finally, we were once again reminded, as we spend years milling cedar, that the forests manage us more that we can ever pretend to manage them.

And, once again, we can’t help wondering “what’s next?”.