Joshua trees are endangered by fires
Scientists have labeled these trees as charismatic mega-flora. But along with other endangered species, they are eventually going to be destroyed by raging wildfires:.
They are Joshua, giant Sequoia and Redwood trees.
A New York Times article offered this picturesque definition of the three species:
“The enchantment that California’s forests provoke can be scientific or spiritual. For the state’s three famous plant species, it is probably both. The allure stems from each one’s unique blend of size, shape and age. Their heft, their height, their persistence. Their sheer audacity.”
The Joshua trees that grow all over the high desert seem to have planted themselves under the wide-spacing, distancing rules that are now applied to people and objects during the pandemic virus crisis.
“The Joshua trees are the most good-natured of desert plants, frozen in dance poses as they endure the harshest of environment with flair,” the Times explained. “They have a timeless quality that can make their onlooker feel small and impermanent by comparison, the way a night sky does
Three major tree species that have decorated California for thousands of years — Joshua, giant Sequoia and Redwood — are now facing huge fire disasters because of the climate crisis.
to stargazers.”
But the 2020 wildfires are particularly alarming. Each of these species already faced a rising onslaught of threats to long-term survivability, from drought to development, blanketed by the unknowable future effects of climate change.
The Joshua trees are wellarmed with sharp spikes that will draw blood from any intruder but they face other dangers.
The Times writers said that 2020 was particularly alarming. Each of these species faced a rising onslaught of threats, including a century’s worth of forest mismanagement and the quickening pace of global warming, threatening them like never before.
Rather than the slow, almost imperceptible migration of the Joshua trees toward high latitudes, more than a million were consumed by flames in two days.
Researchers studying a 1,400year history etched into the rings of tree cores found evidence of fire at least every 30 years among Sequoias.
The forensic evidence stopped about 100 years ago, as fire became seen as a threat to be suppressed, not part of a cycle to be managed. The forests thickened.
There is a consensus among scientists that California must, in part, burn its way out of the current predicament with more prescribed fires — controlled, low-level burns designed to prevent catastrophic blazes later.