Conifer Country Blog

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Five-Needle Pines Community Science Project

As a board member of the Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation, I decided to help cook up this project because all is not well with the five-needle pines of western North America.

Five-needle pines along the Pacific Crest Trail include the sugar pine, limber pine, foxtail pine, whitebark pine, and western white pine. Crucial to the mountain ecosystems where they occur, these trees face an uncertain future, and scientists are trying to learn more.

You can help and are invited

Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation has partnered with the California Native Plant Society and the Pacific Crest Trail Association to raise awareness about the plight of five-needle pines and conduct this community science project. The goal is to get thru-, section-hikers, and everyone who visits to the trail to map and inventory five-needle pines along the Pacific Crest Trail.

By participating, you will help increase awareness of the changes affecting our world while improving connections to nature. Working together to document what’s happening is a positive step toward recovery.

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The Klamath Mountains: A Natural History

The Klamath Mountains

I could not be more proud of our new book. It is, in reality, a project 10-years in the making. I first started cooking up the idea when I finished Conifer Country in 2012 based on the fact that a natural history had never been written for the Klamath Mountains. Around 2015, during a winter gathering, I proposed an outline to a group of friends and asked who wanted to help write the book with me. Justin Garwood raised his hand and the rest is now history!

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The Klamath-Appalachian Connection

In the Tertiary, beginning around 65 million years ago [Ma], a temperate forest prevailed unlike any other in Earth’s history. Referred to as the Arcto-Tertiary forest—existing on a landmass that would soon become North America, Europe, and Asia—a blending of conifers and broad-leaved trees dominated the landscape. With continental drift and climate change, the offspring of these great forests were fragmented. Over time, ice ages came and went, causing a change in flora as increasingly dry conditions became more common. The descendants of the Arcto-Tertiary forest became less extensive and more isolated. These progenitors have remained, finding refuge in the higher and cooler regions which maintained a climate more similar to that of the early Tertiary and creating, today, a strong Klamath-Appalachian Connection (see R. H. Whittaker 1961).

Klamath-Appalachian Connection
Map of the glacier maximum during the Pleistocene and the location of the mountains under discussion.
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Francis Beidler Forest

One of the last old-growth swamps in South Carolina.

Francis Beidler Forest

On our summer vacation, we visited one of two remaining old-growth tracts in South Carolina. Based on what remains–a small legacy indeed–it is arguably the best and largest example of an old-growth bald cypress forest left in the world. The protected land consists of over 18,000 acres of mainly bald cypress and tupelo gum hardwood forest and swamp with approximately 1,800 acres of old-growth.

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