Ancient redwoods recover from fire by sprouting 1000-year-old buds | Hacker News Reader

Ancient redwoods recover from fire by sprouting 1000-year-old buds

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334 pointssohkamyung118 comments

Here in the U.S. west coast mountains some land owners started controlled fires on their property to get rid of the stacking fuel naturally while preserving the bound minerals and helping the large redwoods and sequoias to fend of contenders. I have no idea how they managed to get a permit in this area where officials and population ate crazily scared of these natural processes given that uncontrolled fires make the news every year.

Also, a second generation redwood forest looks very different from an undisturbed one I recently learned from a forest guy who walked with me. He was reading the forest like a book. Very impressive. Turns out, my forest is a second generation and I should maybe take down a few redwoods, something I considered morally wrong before the walkthrough.

Prescribed burns (intentional, hopefully controlled, fires) are increasingly common in modern forestry and wildfire prevention. They're done in Canada and Australia, and from a quick search, it was brought back into practice in the 1990s in the USA.

Parks Canada has an interesting FAQ about their practices: https://parks.canada.ca/nature/science/conservation/feu-fire...

In South Australia, they're very much monitored and controlled. In the Northern Territory however, it is not uncommon in season to see fires burning beside the highway in a national park, and no one anywhere nearby monitoring them. Well, that is besides birds who hang around to nab fleeing insects and other creatures. Birds have been known to carry burning twigs elsewhere to spread the fire too.

Coming from the former region and visiting the latter, it's quite jarring. But that (now called) mosaic burning has thousands of years of history. You can easily see how it advantaged the early occupants of the area: reduce overall fuel load, flush out animals to hunt, and clear annoying tall, dry grasses which would be miserable to live amongst and walk through.

In Western Australia they are a racket. Land is burned for burning's sake as an area of required burning is defined and people rush to hit a quota. Studies are showing that land left untouched for years is actually less flammable than land in the medium turn after burn-off. Additionally, the effects on air quality cannot be discounted either. It is a politicized issue and people are terrified of being seen as not doing anything to combat bushfires that would otherwise threaten homes.

this comment is useful to show how opposed various parties can be.. I have > forty recent, peer reviewed forestry sciencepapers on this topic here in California, where I share them with others who want to educate themselves on the topic.. here we share some characteristics with some parts of Australia regarding wildfires.. in recent years, the severity and scale of some fires have shattered previous records.

Prescribed burns are much more common in the southeastern US than in other areas: https://www.wabe.org/why-the-southeast-is-ahead-of-the-west-...

Controlled burns is a very old practice. So old, in fact, that Native American tribes have used it for centuries to prevent catastrophic wild fires in North America.

Supposedly. In my readings the evidence is thin on this oft-repeated claim.

Very interesting, could you point us to some further reading?

Stephen Pyne has written a few books about this [1] and given talks (this one is very good [2]

[1] https://www.stephenpyne.com/works.htm [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zP7MD2y7T8

Your video [2] does not support the claim that the early Americans did not use prescribed fire. Discussion starts around 50:00.

The (US) National Park Service disagrees with you, so much so that in some places they hire native elders to help them with controlled burns. They call the practices "cultural burning". They were done for many purposes, over millenia.

See https://www.nps.gov/subjects/fire/indigenous-fire-practices-...

The small tribes of the northwest might have used fire for clearing land in their immediate area but there is no evidence that they were managing hundreds of thousands of acres of forests in order to reduce large wildfires.

Most old growth trees are gone. He gave proof they used controlled burns. Where is the evidence for the claim it's only ""small"" tribes?

According to the research done by Charles Mann in 1491, the indigenous population used fire to drive prey into hunting zones. I believe he even presents the theory that is what created the grassland plains across the central US. He presents quite a bit of evidence from primary sources.

I’m not a historical scholar and so maybe his evidence is “bunk”, but his work seems to be very well received in academic circles (unlike say Graham Hitchcock who is seen as more of a Malcolm Gladwell type).

Graham Hancock, I think you mean.

I’m surprised a study from before the Colombian exchange is still relevant in ecology.

Most of the area in between the Mississippi and the west coast doesn’t get enough precipitation to support trees. I don’t think that was generally understood until Powell’s survey a couple hundred years later.

There were lots of tribes though, so it probably added up to a humongous area.

> The (US) National Park Service disagrees with you, so much so that in some places they hire native elders to help them with controlled burns. They call the practices "cultural burning".

But that can only be justified by a raw appeal to public relations. No native elder has any relevant experience today.

Yeah it’s one of those things that kind of sits uncomfortably in the “native Americans were wise nature wizards and we have to unlearn our toxic western industrial capitalist beliefs in order to rediscover their hidden mystical wisdom to save the planet” territory

Like it’s a good story, and it’s true to some degree, but the pageantry around the language people use when treating it is… I dunno it just still sounds like gross Cowboys-and-Indians prose.

Native Americans were wise natural wizards.... but it was the Native American Beavers[1,2] doing the work, not the people.

[1] https://kingcounty.gov/en/legacy/services/environment/animal...

[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-beavers-shape...

Though they did it for deer and preferred plant habitat I think.

Well, "had used it for centuries..."

I'm not sure about redwoods, but tropical rainforests take something like 5,000-10,000 years to return to pristine old-growth state.

This makes me want to see designated areas for old-growth forests to re-establish, and yet there’s almost no chance that the people living in those areas 2000 years from now will have continuously held the same values and kept the project going.

Cynic. I plan to prove you wrong.

Day 1: Trees in backyard are fine. Sent a triumphant note to Odyssey7.

Amazing. Keep me posted!

I’LL SHOW YOU BUDDY

Maybe the Chernobyl exclusion zone will become an old growth forest some day!

The idea of using nuclear waste to protect pristine natural environments is a good one. It's the most effective one we have today. After a few generations I heard animals aren't affected anymore, it also depends on the kind of fallout.

Plenty of people in California are doing this. Basically they buy a large amount of acreage up where nobody cares (mostly Mendocino county or Humboldt county, but sporadically throughout Sonoma County / Marin County/ rest of the Bay) then spend about a decade putting the land into a trust, and marking each separate trees to make sure people don’t poach them. The largest one is the ‘Save the Redwoods’ league, but I’ve spent many days hiking through redwood preserves just from some random person who died and made a land trust as their legacy.

People 2000 years from now will also be enamored with Redwoods (provided they still exist), they’ve been highly regarded for thousands of years already, and they will for thousands more.

I hope these efforts work out. Interesting approach.

Where did you read that?

The Quetzal and the Macaw: the Story of Costa Rica's rainforests. https://www.amazon.com/Quetzel-Macaw-Story-Costa-National/dp...

Page 75: "Scientists estimate it takes from five to ten thousand years to completely reconstruct a virgin rainforest."

I'd question that definition of "pristine". The old-growth temperate rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington, have only existed for about 10-12,000 years; that's about how long it's been since the entire area was covered by an ice sheet.

but as the ice sheet retreated, was that area colonized by species already adapted to temperate rainforest? or did unique speciation occur in situ?

Here's an overview that has a timeline and some jumping off points if you're interested in learning more. What happened as the ice retreated varied by area and some of the valleys in particular have been studied to see what species arrived, in what order, and to investigate delays by some.

https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/olym/schalk/cha...

> In comparing the various palynological sources for Northwestern Washington and surrounding regions, it is clear that the vegetation history varies at least in its details from area to area. For example, Heusser (1978:1576) notes that treeless conditions persisted longer after glacial retreat in the Hoh Valley than in the northwestern corner of the Olympic Peninsula.

> ...the arrival of coniferous trees in this area was apparently delayed by aridity until sometime between 11,000 and 9,600 yr B.P.

At least part of that is the climate. A forest in a tropical zone is so efficient at processing nutrients that the soil beneath a forest is almost nutrient-free; the nutrients are always moving from plant to plant. If you take off the forest, what is left is not very hospitable and erodes easily.

Temperate forests accumulate humus; remove the trees and there are nutrients sitting there waiting to foster new growth.

(IANA forestry expert...)

Sometimes those landowners doing prescribed burns don't always do them in the best conditions. The Estrada Fire was near the Santa Cruz Mountains east of Watsonville. I've been to the property several times over the years and it has some beuatiful redwood groves including an albino redwood or two.

Story - https://pajaronian.com/as-cal-fire-makes-progress-on-estrada...

The US West Coast lags way behind almost the entire rest of the US w.r.t using controlled burns to limit wildfire danger.

California intentionally burns like only half of the area as Minnesota, despite being like twice as big.

Arkansas, GA, SC, etc all burn like 5-10x what CA does, for prevention purposes.

Growing up outside of the West and moving to the West later, I was shocked how little controlled burns there are here.

> Arkansas, GA, SC, etc all burn like 5-10x what CA does, for prevention purposes.

I live in ATL and just drove back home from being up north for thanksgiving, drove through a huge prescribed burn on the way a few days ago.

My understanding is that California air pollution regulations make it incredibly difficult to burn. The fact that, if you don't do a controlled burn it will result in an much larger uncontrolled burn later is not taken into account by the regulations.

It's a bit more complicated than that: the California Air Resources Board sets statewide rules but the permitting for prescribed burns and the final responsibility for air quality lies with the 35 air districts. They already have the power to ignore many air quality regulations when granting permits but their politics are all over the place and there's tons of locally driven NIMBYism that's more influential than it would be at the state level. In some districts prescribed burns are a lot easier than in others.

CARB has been researching the issue of prescribed burns for decades and ever since the mid to late 2010s is completely on board, but the air districts are slower to follow. On top of that, the difference in land management priorities between the National Forest Service, BLM, and the State of California complicates everything. One of the best arguments for the Federal government divesting of its land in the west is to allow the states to better manage their own resources (states' rights comes full circle).

after the 2018 season, Gov Newsom did oversee a series of comprehensive settlements between major parties regarding cost, authority and procedures. Secondly the long-standing CalFIRE lead was terminated.

Yup - sooner or later mother nature wins. And those larger burns? Instead of being beneficial they actually kill the trees. It's what happened to Yosemite in the 2000's and killed thousands of acres of trees.

You would do well to remember father time is the only one that always wins

> California intentionally burns like only half of the area as Minnesota, despite being like twice as big.

Well the wildfire arsonists take care of the other half.

(I'm serious, not joking. You don't need to do a controlled burn if the wildfire already did one for you.)

> You don't need to do a controlled burn if the wildfire already did one for you.

That seems to get cause and effect backwards. Had California done more controlled burns, then they wouldn't have had nearly as many disastrous wildfires.

California would still have lots of disastrous wildfires regardless of controlled burns, because the chaparral ecosystem is spark-limited, not fuel-limited. Unless you limit your comments to forest ecosystems, which is only half the story, and very little of the urban-wildland interface.

Most of the recent wildfires have been due to arson.

Yet the rapid spread and destruction is often from build up of undergrowth.

People like to blame various west coast states for this, but do note it's mostly federal land, managed by federal employees. East coasters tend to not comprehend how much federal land there is in the southwest/west; watching tourists is fun.

Yea I'm not blaming the state governments because I don't know who's responsible for burns, just pointing out that the end result is the west coast is a tinderbox relative to the rest of the country

There is very little original "old growth" forest anywhere in the Continental US. It is usually in small parts of hard to log areas like around small streams, soft ground blocking how to remove the logs and certain slopes and hills.

I remember when Big Basin south of the Bay Area was on fire in 2020. The alarmists were talking about how the fires were so especially intense that the region would never recover. I said at the time they were all full of hogwash, and there's nothing particularly special about the fire and it would recover. Heaps upon heaps of insults were laid upon me.

Guess what, I was right. Every time humans think they know better than nature, they are wrong. Humans interpret things like forest fires as "bad" just like they think rain is "bad" but there's no good or bad in nature, just cycles, and every time we have the hubris to think we know better, like trying to stop forest fires, we are wrong. We need to just step out of the way of Mother Nature and let her do what she does best, which is continue the cycle of life for herself.

You're right but you can probably caveat that with natural cycles and not man made disasters

What’s more man-made is artificially preventing wildfires so dead brush builds up then you have a far worse fire.

Climate change isn’t causing wild fires. Wild fires are a natural part of nature’s cycle. What’s unnatural is us artificially delaying these cycles, then they come back 10x more intense.

For cases where wild fires are directly caused by people (arson, bad camping practices), these fires are also more intense.

This stuff happens all through the religion of science. I’m not a religious person, but time and time again the scientific community cries out “XYZ is bad/stupid/a relic of religion” then years later there’s some scientific evidence for it and we spend another 5 years pushing back against the scientific community to change from their old ways.

> Climate change isn’t causing wild fires.

I get what you are trying to say, but that statement alone is too blunt to be accurate. Desertification, extended drought and record high temperatures do directly relate to causing fires.

Scientist don't think they are right or wrong they work with the data they have and add new data when it comes available otherwise they are not scientists. Honestly, insane that I have to say it on HN.

What is your scientific background? Your comment seems naive and disconnected to what is happening in research labs.

Not every country fucked up their scientific community like the US did with their main focus on grants and star power but even with their educational system kneecapped by capital the US is still a scientific power house because of the thousands of people that do honest work and get ignored by biased and self-righteous comments like yours.

If you have any insights lay it down on me...

That is a normative and outdated view of science proposed by logical positivists, it tells you how science is ought to be not how it is. A cursory look at history of science will tell you this is not so. Scientists bring their own biases and opinions and colour the data as they seem fit. Other major point is data is not value neutral it is theory laden.

Sure, but what is the alternative?

That science is a process of getting towards tentative truth via observations. That there is no single method of science, but there are several pathways by which scientific knowledge can be obtained. You can read Thomas Kuhn (structure of scientific revolutions), Imre Lakatos (Proofs and Refutations) for this perspective. Kuhn brought in the historical perspective which was missing earlier to study of philosophy of science. Also, you can look at books by Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield which detail a historical perspetive of development of scientific ideas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proofs_and_Refutations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Toulmin

I’ll take the other side here. First, ok you were right in that the redwoods of big basin seem very healthy right now. I was swayed personally, as a layperson, by the following argument: it’s possible that current wildfires differ from past wildfires in heat and intensity because of human factors like climate change and too much fire suppression. I hope I was NOT one of the people you felt ridiculed by, my only hope was that the notion be considered with some seriousness and rigor. It still seems possible to me that future wildfires operate differently than those of the past, and I still would favor cautious conservation policies in that regard.

What you call "cautious conservatism" is actually playing fast and loose with the rules, and doing the wrong thing, if the prescribed burns are actually important.

No. What I want is more unbiased scientific study of the topic before assuming we know for certain that climate change hasn’t altered the relationship between wildfire and forrest health. Funding more research is hardly “playing fast and loose” rather it is the opposite.

Big Basin is recovering, but it is a long way from recovery. If there aren't any fires as severe as the CZU fire for many years it will recover. But if intense fires become more frequent, that's far less clear. The regrowth you see in Big Basin, as described in the article, appears to have been fueled by sugar reserves in the old growth trees. Can they sustain that if they get hit again and again?

We have "just cycles" if the climate, on average, is fairly steady. But if there's a hotter/dryer trend, the areas that can sustain redwoods will drift north, and this might be difficult for very long-lived trees to keep up with.

300m years ago we had Pangea. I wait for that to recover.

I'm holding out for the cycle of planet formation to repeat

So Long Earth, Thanks for the Air and Whatnot.

> Big Basin is recovering, but it is a long way from recovery.

Define recovery. Do you mean recovery to the point that your Instagram pictures are as beautiful as before? Or do you mean that life is thriving and the forest is in its rebuilding phase?

> If there aren't any fires as severe as the CZU fire

How on earth can you get severe fires when the forests don't have as much fuel as they did before? The entire cycle is self-limiting.

> Can they sustain that if they get hit again and again?

Yes.

I don't have a stake in the broader fight, but note that severe fires often leave extra fuel in their wake. (It is a surprising fact, to me at least.) This is because 1) live tree trunks don't burn in severe fires, they leave behind dead trunks (which do burn next time) and 2) the ground cover that comes up will be more massive than the ground cover that used to be there.

>> Can they sustain that if they get hit again and again?

> Yes

Let me fix that for you. The correct answer is not.

A "severe" fire is any wildfire causing severe consequences. A small bonfire that would kill the last 20 specimens extant of a wild flower would be severe, for sure. Those small controlled fires will kill all the trees in the cohort 2-8 years old. Do it each five years and is "forest assassination". Dozens of species will quit the area because soil can not hold water anymore. There is not such thing as a free lunch.

I've been hiking in Big Basin for about 30 years now, and have been there since the fire. To use your language "the forest in its rebuilding phase" but it will take a long time.

The CZU damage was on a whole other scale from other burned forests I've hiked in that have recovered much more quickly.

the technical term missing here is "catastrophic" .. it differentiates between ordinary and extra-ordinary damage

> Guess what, I was right.

Not sure if you are physically capable of assessing the evidence. Everything hinges on how one divides the two words in your user name ;)

I highly recommend the book "The hidden life of trees". It shows trees in a different light by explaining their behaviors as a collective, how connected they are, and how they help each other survive and thrive over thousands of years. Did you know that trees can recognize their own offsprings?

Does tree feel the pain when we cut then?

If so, it would be more humane to cut them down as quickly as possible so as to minimize their suffering. I recommend C4.

I assume you mean the explosive [0] not the plants [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-4_(explosive)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_C4_plants

yes it is an interesting read, however you should know that some of their "facts" are highly speculative and some were proven wrong in the last decade.

Way too much anthropomorphism in that book imo.

Does this mean trees have evolutionary countermeasures to fires? Does this in turn mean fires were so much more common than we think?

I can’t tell if this is sarcasm or not. But the answer to the first question has been known in the forestry community to be yes for quite some time.

For instance - there are certain species that require the heat of a fire for their seeds to explode and grow new plants.

Believe it or not: the forestry community is not that big

Edit: and judging from the gratuitous downvotes, pretty petty as well

I think the reason for downvotes here is that you don’t need to be in the forestry community to know this. It’s been in science textbooks since I was in 4th grade, kids did presentations and posters on it, it’s in documentaries, it’s on informational plaques in multiple national parks. The fact that some tree species are evolved to survive fires or require fires for germination is not controversial.

It's not that the forestry community is petty, it's more likely that the HN community doesn't like comments that don't add substantively to the conversation, and particularly doesn't like them as an add-on to a thoughtful and polite answer to a question.

Doubting my integrity by suggesting I'm being sarcastic just because I don't know something that clearly isn't common knowledge is thoughtful and polite?

That describes me. Don't take downvotes as a remark on your position. I pass them out to anything that doesn't raise the level of discussion.

I also hand them out to every top ancestor comment that uses the word 'downvote', for the same reason.

In California over the last few years, salience has led forestry and fire's place in it to become a bit less of a niche interest, at least certainly among the geekier/hn-leaning community.

My understanding is that fires in forests are not only quite common and have been long before humans were around, but that naturally-occurring fires are a critical part of forest's natural lifecycle and evolution.

Fire has been a major force in the evolution of land-based life. Even more so in the distant past. In the Cretaceous (70 - 140 million years ago) both temperatures and the oxygen ratio in the atmosphere appear to have been higher than now. The whole planet was covered in a thick tropical forest -- and it burned easily. The dinosaurs had to contend with continent-wide forest fires, and their bones are often found in the middle of a layer of charcoal.

Yes. Some species actually need fire for their seeds to activate at all. I'm surprised this isn't more widely known. I wonder what would change about climate activism and wildfire management if more people understood this.

Maybe. But most fires in the California coast are human caused. Today, lightning is extremely rare.

Furthermore, be careful extending this train of thought to other biomes. My understanding of California chaparral is it's evolved to survive fire, but if it happens too often the biome disappears and turns into grassland. Some of the plants take decades of recovery before they are capable of fruiting.

Just because a species has evolved to survive fire doesn't necessarily mean it needs it.

Massive fire suppression is uniquely human.

> But most fires in the California coast are human caused. Today, lightning is extremely rare.

Is it actually any less common than it used to be, or are lightning fires simply a much smaller percentage of burning measured by fire count or acreage?

I can't speak for CA but up in Oregon we regularly have lightning causing fires all summer.

> But most fires in the California coast are human caused.

Worth a note that regular usage of fire to clear underbrush was a very, very long standing practice among the native population - long enough to have affected the landscape and the trees in it.

Even places like New Jersey have done prescribed burns for the last 100 years (source: ex-resident))

ecosystems of trees differ greatly across the globe. Here in California, one widely cited reference article on this topic is doi:10.1093/biosci/bix146

Drought, Tree Mortality, and Wildfire in Forests Adapted to Frequent Fire Stephens, et al. 2018

Yes, they do the bark of a redwood trees is fire resistance, and even certain seeds in the forest need fire in order to start their germination.

In areas prone to fire some plants do have evolutionary adaptation.

In the Mediterranean, cork oaks have thick bark (which we use to make cork for wine bottles...) that scorches while the tree survives.

The seeds of Australian acacias need the heat from wildfires in order to germinate.

In some cycads the heat of fire triggers blooming, and gardeners stick hay in the crown and set it on fire in order to get a bloom and seeds.

Etc.

Trees native to many areas have developed evolutionary countermeasures to fires. Trees native to many other areas haven't. Some trees have measures to recover from being eaten or destroyed by large animals, and often those measures work equally well if the tree was damaged by fire or even burned down completely.

Trees are such a diverse group of plants that it's hard to say anything about them in aggregate

If a tree lives on average for 200 years, and has a mortality rate of 100% in a forest fire, you don't need fires to be very common for adaptations to fire to be worth it. Just one fire in each forest every 2,000 years or so would be enough. 20,000 years should do too, but I'm less confident of this.

Was lighting more common? Probably not. Were forests bigger and less gardened to prevent spread of fire? Definitely. So for each tree, there was a much larger area of vulnerability to lightning strikes.

This is certainly true for the American West. Unfortunately in places like Patagonia the lenga trees never had to adapt to natural fire, so man-made fires are catastrophic.

> Were forests bigger and less gardened to prevent spread of fire? Definitely. So for each tree, there was a much larger area of vulnerability to lightning strikes.

May be. We can't be sure about that.

Those forests housed a lot of megafauna. I can easily imagine American mammooths "gardening" the forest and removing everything green and edible from the soil. Giant slots, giant rhinos like Paraceratherium, Giant marsupials like Diprotodon, elephants and other mega herbivores most probably roamed searching the huge bulk of plant products that they needed each day. They most probable needed to complete its diet with suboptimal food like fallen leaves, barks, branches and dry weeds to reach its quota.

Most of that megafauna went extinct by men and that can't be fixed. Of those that survived, the 60% of the extant big herbivores are in danger of going extinct now, so the problem could take a big turn for worse.

European bison was a candidate to reintroduction for the possible benefit of cleaning branches, thorn shrubs and flammable materials from forests soils that cattle don't touch.

Some species of tree have cones that need to be burned before they will open. So, probably yes.

Absolutely, many trees have evolutionary countermeasures to fires. Some trees are very well-suited to colonized disturbed ground - they will opportunistically surge into an area after a wildfire, as either more of their seeds will germinate, or more seedlings will sprout into favorable conditions. Other trees have adaptations that make it more likely to survive wildfire; both sequoia and douglas-fir have layers of insulating bark up to a foot thick.

Some trees have adaptations to ensure that their seeds only spread after a wildfire; sequoia cones are sealed shut by a resin that only melts in the intense heat of a wildfire. Some species can even be thought of as having adaptations that encourage wildfires in order to out-compete species that are less wildfire-resistant; grasslands require wildfire on the shoulders of foothills, where otherwise trees would gradually creep down the slopes. The dry foliage at the end of summer provides ideal conditions for wildfires.

If you want to learn more about fire adaptation, an excellent entry point is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serotiny.

Lets play to "who can say the most flippant feel-good thing in biology?".

The fact that there is not such thing as an 1000-year old bark or a 1000 year old buds does not matter. The growing part of the tree is only a few years old, and the buds lie in that part. Old cork is dead. Old wood is dead; just a bunch of tubes. Cambium is the alive part.

I predict that there will be a severe wildfire season in US in 2024. If you read this articles, you will feel much better about the loss in any case.

As far as my understanding, nothing much different from what other plants do.

Anybody with any experience with home plants will know that for most plants if you cut off the tip of the plant/branch (places where new growth happens) it will promote sprouting more branches in lower parts of the plant. Most plants will have special places where new growth can happen and experienced florist/gardener can exploit this to shape the plant to their desire.

As far as I understand, there is a chemical gradient that causes nutrients produced in roots to flow to the tips of the plant for growth. If you cut off the tips, there is no more a place where the chemicals are used and that abundance -- mismatch between the large root system and much less ability to consume -- is what triggers new growth.

Here, you have an enormous tree with developed root system but you essentially killed/cut off the upper part. The abundance of nutrients causes new growth.

Anyone interested in trees and/or great writing should read "The Overstory: A Novel", which earned author Richard Powers a well-deserved Pulitzer. Highly recommended.

Whenever I read these stories I wonder what I can do to maintain the forest on my own property better.

Curious if anyone here has any books they would recommend on tree identification and maintenance?

https://old.reddit.com/r/marijuanaenthusiasts/

a lot of people can identify trees on internet. Just describe your trees

Arborists learn all sorts of things including climbing, rope work, safety with saws, root structures, etc. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arborist for an overview. If you just want to ID trees, take photos of as many of the base, bark, leaves, flowers, seeds and general growth habit as you can, then upload to iNaturalist.org to get an ID.

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