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To regrow forests the U.S. needs billions of seeds–and many more 'seed hunters'
- debacle 5y agoThis is one of the fluffiest, least aligned with reality pieces I have ever read on tree propagation, and I've read a lot of silly things about tree propagation. If I want to propagate 5,000 trees I have a few options. I can do what this article describes, and fiddle with some sort of artisan method for collecting seeds, or I can do two much more realistic things: Plant 20,000 seeds indiscriminately, knowing full well that many wont germinate, some of the ones that germinate wont reach the true leaf stage, most of the ones that reach the true leaf stage will take a good long while to reach 1', and of those that reach 1' I should expect to lose between 1/6th and 2/3rds in the next 2 years depending on the species, growing area, etc. Or, more likely: Take 7,500 cuttings from various different mother plants, propagate them using highly effective methodologies tailored to the specific needs of their species based on datasets that have been honed for decades, and lose roughly 1/3rd to the luck of the draw. Propagating from seed is something you do when you need the benefits of sexual reproduction and hybridization (look at the chestnut for an example), but if you need a lot of plants in a short period of time you propagate from cutting for many different reasons.
- Faaak 5y agoDoes that create perfect clones ?
- lobocinza 5y agoThe tradeoff is loss of genetic variance.
- fennecfoxen 5y agoIf you only take one cutting per plant you’ve just moved the tree, you’re no worse off than before.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- animal_spirits 5y ago> Over the next 20 years, the U.S. aims to plant billions more trees in order to restore millions of acres of scorched forest and help offset planet-warming carbon emissions. In the West alone, some 10 million acres of recently burned land are waiting to be replanted. This sounds like a wrong goal at first glance. One of the root causes of the crazy wildfire season we've seen (along with drought) is overpopulation of trees. Lots and lots of fuel close together. From what I've learned Western forests are _supposed_ to be thin and patchy, these forests evolved with fire in it's environment - some trees seeds do not even germinate until after a fire occurs! [0] Unless a trained forester can correct me, from my perspective the best solution is to let regrowth happen naturally for best case long term sustainability. [0] https://www.nationalforests.org/our-forests/your-national-forests-magazine/how-trees-survive-and-thrive-after-a-fire https://www.nationalforests.org/our-forests/your-national-fo...
- ddingus 5y agoI used to collect seeds for the Forest Service as a kid in the 70's. Messy sticky work. But, for those willing to really get after it, the pay wasn't bad, assuming one doesn't count the DAYS spent getting pitch off of everything, one's own self included!
- stjohnswarts 5y agoI'm just thinking about all the ticks in the underbrush...
- ddingus 5y agoIn the northwest ticks are less of a problem, but still something to watch for. Some kinds of trees, say noble fir, it's possible to climb the tree and harvest the cones, and or shake them loose, often right into a truck bed. Fun times, 50 feet up in a tree, in the winter... :D
- thinkingemote 5y agoOne tree will produce millions of seeds by itself without any human help. They will form into seedlings and grow into trees also without human help. The issue is that we don't let nature do it's thing and we want trees to be where we say. It's hubris.
- kkjjkgjjgg 5y agoThat last picture doesn't look like an organically grown forest to me. More like agriculturally planted trees. I'm not convinced they are doing the right thing. Why not let nature run its course?
- ben_bai 5y agoYou don't have to steal from quirrels, they even plant the trees for free.
- okareaman 5y agohttps://archive.md/OOnct https://archive.md/OOnct
- micromacrofoot 5y ago> the number of skilled seed collectors in the U.S. has been dwindling, though it’s not clear by how much, since the work is seasonal; it’s also gruelling [sic], for not much pay. OK, pay people for the work then! This kind of thing always gets framed as a labor or skill shortage, but it's always a pay shortage. These programs need money, and they need it now! The military has so much money they literally don't know what to do with it. Make them plant some damn trees! Climate security is national security.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- 14 5y agoI wonder if propagation from branches is possible. I know it is extremely hard but surely it could be studied and solutions found to maximize efforts? That and if these seeds are so needed then why isn’t the government paying more to encourage the industry?
- markdown 5y ago> I wonder if propagation from branches is possible. That depends on the species, but in any case trees grown via marcotting or cuttings don't have a tap root and can be susceptible to wind damage. Further, it isn't very scalable.
- dryst 5y agoMaybe not scalable to industrial processes, but it scales in time. A cutting can easily create a tree of the size that a seedling would take 3-5 years grow.
- brunooo 5y agoCan’t find the paper right now, but China has a massive effort underway to tissue culture needle trees for large areas in the West. Single needle can basically be raised to dozens of seedlings in 3 months, and thus the only way they found to reach the scale they were looking for.
- CameronNemo 5y agoIs there sex involved, or are they clones?
- _ph_ 5y agoThis sounds like they are clones of the tree the needles were take from. But if the don't take a thousand needles from one tree but one needle from a thousand trees to star with, they would have a lot of generic variety. Going via needles would only mean "skipping" one generation of intermixing the genes, but the new trees would be as genetically varied as their origins.
- mythrwy 5y agoSex sex sex, that's all they think about. (Clones if it's tissue culture)
- joshuamcginnis 5y agoHow does one become a "skilled seed collector"? Are there jobs for them?
- swader999 5y agoA helicopter cuts the top of a seed tree off and people on the ground harvest the cones. A nursery grows them into plugs that are planted a couple of years later.
- pabs3 5y agoThe article mentions that collectors learn by doing but there are some courses related to the profession and that there are jobs but not enough people available to do the jobs.
- readflaggedcomm 5y ago>a cache of pine cones worth $15 a bushel. These woody cones are in steep demand A bushel, even of lightweight pine cones, is fairly large at eight gallons. For some varieties*, a bushel of pine cones delivers 1.2 pounds of pine nuts per bushel. $15 per sounds unlike "steep demand" to me, based on my observation of prices of raw pine nuts in areas I've been where they're harvested by locals. But they provide no justification for their idea, or market context. It just leaves me suspicious. * https://www.fs.fed.us/eng/ref/seedlings/conecoll/determine.htm https://www.fs.fed.us/eng/ref/seedlings/conecoll/determine.h...
- xipho 5y agoThis seems like a short term fix prone to all the problems of mono-culture. First pine-beetle infestations brining in disease put all that hard-work to naught. There is a natural progression to growing forests, how about protecting, and just staying off large swaths of land, using fire treatment and land management techniques as we understand them and let the land restore itself? Perhaps we have to think past 5-10 year windows and start to work at plans that think a minimum of 50 years out. Old-growth forests take easily that long, at minimum, to get started "naturally".
- jillesvangurp 5y agoYes, the key to success here is restoring the soil. Once you have healthy soil, the only way to stop forests from happening is large herbivores. There are some interesting large scale efforts to attempt to restore soil across the world. It's a remarkably fast process once it gets going. The Chinese have a few decades experience with regreening: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Green_Wall_(China) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Green_Wall_(China) Doing it wrong, can have some negative effects as well.
- smallerfish 5y ago> Once you have healthy soil, the only way to stop forests from happening is large herbivores ...or primates.
- turbinerneiter 5y agoAs far as I understand, the natural progression to growing forest easily breaks once the forest is gone. Large swaths of land around the Mediterranean are now desert but used to be forest, until they were cut down. Erosion and other factors than stop new forests from growing. In these cases you need to kickstart the process by sending the correct starter.
- FuriouslyAdrift 5y agoManaged grazing within forested land is an option. Our forests have become too dense in many areas due to overly aggressive fire management. https://forestry.usu.edu/news/utah-forest-facts/forest-grazing-managing-your-land-for-trees-forage-and-livestock https://forestry.usu.edu/news/utah-forest-facts/forest-grazi...
- errcorrectcode 5y agoGiant forest fires enter the chat. I survived the 2018 Camp Fire and moved to the central US where disaster risks are low. You can't sequester anything if the trees burn or fix soil and desertification if there's no rain. This is more #TeamTrees, Great Green Wall, and Ethiopia clean-tech virtue-signaling.
- wavefunction 5y agoTrees are supposed to burn but in patches and not en masse due to previous fires in adjoining areas. This is especially true in the area you left. The natural state of the area should be a variety of forest in different levels of maturity which helps contain the fires that do occur in the most mature and overgrown areas. The less mature forest or previous burn scars act as natural fire breaks.
- errcorrectcode 5y agoReforestation is a red herring. Trees don't sequester much if they burn or when they die. Plus, soot from forest fires rapidly accelerates deglaciation and polar ice melting, leading to increasingly-volatile weather as the jet stream patterns destabilize from a lack of cold thermal mass at the poles. Let nature do most of the hard work and sink the results. The most cost-effective way to solve climate change is automated "farming" of GMO oceanic biomass for CCS.
- whiddershins 5y agoDon’t we have a lot more forests in North America than 100 years ago? I thought this was one of those counter-intuitive stats contrarians like to bring up.
- riffraff 5y agoIt's true but mostly because in 1920 it was a historical minimum in the US. So, forests are expanding again (as in Europe and China) but apparently not very fast.