04/09/2022
Will the western redcedar make it out alive? Prolly, but their range will shrink and we might have to go further north or up in elevation to see them...😿😿😾
"Earlier this year, scientists from the Oregon Department of Forestry, the Washington Department of Natural Resources and U.S. Forest Service published the results of a two-year study on the dieback.
The study concludes not only that the cedar dieback is happening throughout Oregon and Washington, but also that the dieback is not the result of a biotic agent — such as a fungi or insect attack — but due to climate, namely the decades-long drought affecting Oregon and Washington."
"In western Oregon and Washington, researchers observed dieback at lower elevations — in Oregon in the Willamette Valley and in Washington in the urban corridor running from Olympia to Puget Sound."
"Wildfires are also expected to play a role, so that by the end of this century, the region’s conifer-dominate forests are expected to give way to mixed conifer and deciduous stands, and trees now common in California will find their ranges shift northward to the Pacific Northwest."
Want to help track cedar die back in the Pacific Northwest? You can with iNaturalist!
Users can geo-locate trees, identify signs of both tree dieback and health and then send those observations to Hulbert.
“We’ve revealed that this is happening all the way from northern British Columbia all the way through Oregon, probably also in California, so the whole distribution [of the species],” says Hulbert."
To many Indigenous peoples, who used the trees for houses, clothes, weapons, tools, medicines, art and canoes, they’re know as the Tree of Life.
