On Friday, I was at the Trinity River in eastern Humboldt County, watching my son splash his way through water as clear as the sky above. One hundred feet upstream, a helicopter repeatedly dipped its bucket into the river, rising up each time to carry its load to one of the fourteen fires that broke out in our county and neighboring counties last week, the results of lightning strikes. As the helicopter passed over our heads, it trailed a stream of water from the bucket, and about three minutes later, it would be raining on us very gently for a minute or two.
This got me thinking, of course, about fire hazard and the toils of keeping cleared, defensible space around one's home when one lives in the country (which I do not). This in turn evoked thoughts of a local NGO in our north coast area, the Mattole Restoration Council (MRC), which is working to encourage homeowners in the Mattole River watershed to provide that defensible space by distributing grant money to help the homeowners get the work done. When each household maintains that magical 100-foot clearance, it benefits the entirety of this remote watershed, where it's often extremely difficult for firefighters to get quick entrance and egress on steep, narrow roads in scattered neighborhoods. With less flammable space around homes (and fewer homes that are themselves flammable--but that's another subject), firefighters can concentrate on attacking the flames in the wildland area rather than spending all their time worrying about defending structures.
This led to thoughts of other worthy MRC work: the organization is working on writing a Program Timberland Environmental Impact Report, a document designed to apply to owners throughout the watershed who want to practice sustainable forestry designed to return Mattole forestlands, many of which were highly degraded by mid-20th-century timber harvest practices, to healthy productivity while protecting water quality and other important values. Having a program document like this (i.e., an already-written "checklist"-type document) will make responsible forestry, which can be an expensive proposition for a small landowner, a real possibility for many watershed residents.
Which brought me to Sudden Oak Death. P. ramorum has moved to the very eastern edges of the Mattole River watershed. Soon, the disease could be one more thing for Mattole valley residents to worry about. Along with the MRC, UC Cooperative Extension has been holding informational workshops about SOD, but concern hasn't built as high here as in some areas of coastal California. This could partly be the result of a few dry years during which the pathogen has become less visible in southern Humboldt County because it has caused less tanoak mortality. On another level, though, it's understandable that many Mattole residents may have "wildland management fatigue" from worrying for so many years about fire, fish, and forestry.
Since Sudden Oak Death has not yet impacted the Mattole, there's a real chance that, given funding and political will, residents could do something the limit the spread throughout the watershed. But the disease is tagging along behind all those other equally important concerns. The question that occurs to me at this point, then, is this: Is there a way to unite these seemingly disparate domains? Given the realities of funding, in which each relatively narrow environmental issue attracts its own funding, scientific study, and advocacy groups, could some kind of comprehensive wildland management assistance ever materialize for rural landowners who need it, like the ones in the Mattole?
When our president talks about creating jobs to help our environment, this is what I see: an army of forest management experts and helpers, working in places like the Mattole to address all these wildland management concerns in a comprehensive manner. On any given property, these folks, organized into teams perhaps, would work on fuel hazard reduction and riparian restoration and erosion remediation and sustainable timber production and weed control and habitat protection and protection from insects and diseases. Considering how each of these management activities can often interact synergistically with the other activities, it remains a wonder to me that this hasn't already happened. It may just be that a vision like this, to come to fruition, will require a collective societal decision that wildland management is worth an investment.
The Mattole River: good for many uses.
I'll be upfront: I stole the title of this post from my supervisor at UC Extension in Eureka, Yana Valachovic, who also took the pictures. She has talked about this subject several times to various audiences, and I think it's so interesting I wanted to post it.
Below are two pictures of the same California bay laurel (Umbellularia californica) tree, one from a distance and one up close. Bay laurel (also called pepperwood, Oregon myrtlewood, or just plain bay) is the main transmitting host of Phytophthora ramorum. The pathogen produces loads of spores on the leaves of bay laurel, and the spores are then blown or splashed onto other trees. If those trees happen to be tanoaks, coast live oaks, Shreve oaks, California black oaks, or--maybe--canyon live oaks, they can be killed. (The bay laurels, meanwhile, remain completely unharmed.)
Because of this, some of the management activities aimed at controlling Sudden Oak Death focus on strategic removal of some bay laurels to reduce disease risks for particular important oaks and tanoaks. As part of our management experiments in the north coast, we decided to try cost-effective ways of killing large bay laurels. It's very expensive for crews to cut them down, remove the limbs, and burn the small limbs and foliage. So we decided to try girdling some trees to see how rapidly they would die in place. Even though the standing trunk and limbs would still be there, the foliage, which is the part of the tree that carries P. ramorum, would be gone.
To make a long story short: nothing doing. Those girdled bays are not interested in dying. The girdle on the tree below was made by one of the landowners with whom we are collaborating. And boy, did he ever girdle it! The "beaver cut" he made goes at least six inches deep into the sapwood.
The top picture gives you a good look at this beaver cut. But if you look at the bottom picture, you'll see that the tree is trying to heal itself.
The roughened area of bark-like tissue in the center of the trunk is an area where the tree is trying to grow a new "bridge" of cambial tissue over the girdled area to heal itself. The crown of this tree is still green and healthy-looking, over two years after it was girdled, despite the tree's inability to move food between crown and roots.
Obviously, bay laurels are amazingly resourceful trees! Maybe this is one reason why several ecologists have speculated that as tanoaks decline in coastal California because of the effects of Sudden Oak Death, bay laurels will increase in dominance in many areas.
