Very well analyzed! Pine woes are quite common in India too, where commercial species have replaced indigenous ones and some even play a huge role in the spread of forest fires going out of hand.
Thanks. It's amazing the places that pines have been planted. The only place in India I've been is Kerala, where I saw old palm plantations. I wish that foresters would look more closely at local conditions and species. But the commercial concerns always seem to come first.
Wow. I’ve run into this before, a native rarity here in California that grows abundantly elsewhere. Melanie, the Monterey pine is native to only a small portion of coastal California, although people have planted it in other places in the state. There are lots of them around San Francisco.
The pine nonetheless has a California Native Plant Society ranking of 1B.1: rare, threatened, or endangered in California and elsewhere. The cones are serotinous; they remain closed until opened by the heat of a fire.
The Monterey pines growing in New Zealand must be cultivars, as the wood from the ones growing here are useless for lumber.
That's fascinating, Paul. I never realised that they weren't considered good timber in their native range. Yes, they must be cultivars. There's been a lot of breeding of radiata for different sites and situations. It's a low quality timber, mostly good for pulp and wood products, but if treated can be used in construction of houses.
Fascinating to think it's actually considered a threatened species in California. Hard to imagine here.
I've got more on pines to come, there are a range of species which have been planted here, and some of them have proven particularly troublesome.
Melanie, I grew up in the eastern part of the United States, where the forests are largely deciduous hardwood forests. In the West, pine woodlands dominate. I cna understand your mixed feelings about them, but I love pines. I love the way they smell, their ability to stay green all year long, and some of the forms of the different trees can be quite beautiful. I'm eager to read more of your writing on these interesting trees!
Thanks Paul. I actually visited some pine forest today (as well as some intact native forest) and had an adorable surprise. High in a pine tree was a dear little miromiro or tomtit, a native species which is not technically threatened but you'd never see near a town or anything like that. I'm also planning another visit to pine forest on Thursday and so plan to write more about them after that.
I love the smell of pines too. They smell like Christmas to most New Zealanders, because they are basically our only option if you want a real Christmas tree.
We've got cases like that in New Zealand. In one notable case, a new species of wētā (a giant flightless grasshopper) was found living in a patch of gorse. Obviously it had once been a forest species, but now its only home was a patch of one of our worst invasives. But the reason gorse was so good for it was because the spines of gorse kept out all the invasive predators that ate the wētā to extinction everywhere else it had once lived.
Our native karearea (falcon) does quite well in pine forest, it likes the mosaic of tall trees and cutover patches.
In my experience there are always some native species that can make the best of the opportunities available, and that includes invasives. But there are other species which are being driven to extinction. It's a good reminder that any management programme has to look carefully at the whole picture.
Thanks for clarifying the issues around carbon sequestration. I had thought that for carbon credits purposes, trees could never be harvested unless the credits were paid back, but maybe this is not the case. If the harvested timber is used, (effectively continuing to store C) there must still be an enormous amount of wastage (which goes back into the atmosphere). What is the % yield from a harvested tree? Another question I've wondered about is the amount of ongoing carbon sequestration occurring in mature forests - with the carbon from rotting trees being stored by microorganisms in the accumulating topsoil. Any comments on this?
I'm still getting my head around some of the details and am in the process of sorting out an interview with a scientist who studies carbon sequestration. I'm not sure at this stage how much is stored and how much is released, but I'm hoping to find this out.
There is definitely ongoing carbon sequestration in mature forests with a lot of carbon ending up in the soil. Off the top of my head, there's a lot more carbon stored in soil than there is in live trees. It's one reason that it's critically important to preserve existing forest, we can't just replace the carbon sequestration in a few decades of growing new trees.
So interesting - I've never thought of pines as an invasive species, but I suppose in some areas they are. Pine forests are beautiful to my eyes when covered in snow; one of the few times I ever enjoyed skiing (and boy, did I try to enjoy it!) was while traversing a fairly flat, snow-laden, and magically quiet pine forest.
That's true - I've been in the mountains in the snow among invasive pines and they did actually look lovely (even though I was there to cut them down). I'm planning a walk in a pine forest in a couple of days, so I'm interested to see if that has the same effect on me as being among the native rainforest where I was earlier today.
Great piece, Melanie! I do love a diverse pine forest, one with undergrowth and a variety of trees sprinkled throughout. Here in the south our forests are mostly hardwood with small pockets of pines occasionally. Then there are the plantations of pines planted for lumber, which always seem spooky to me -- unnaturally straight rows, very dark, mainly filled with poison ivy and carpeted with pine needles. Thanks for the deep dive into a pine I'm not familiar with!
I really hope I'll get to visit a proper pine forest someday. I've made some visits to plantations over the last week, and they haven't delighted me, but I'm sure there's something different about a natural forest.
Melanie. This was interesting to read your struggles with our sometimes reinvention of what is natural in our forests. I enjoy pine forests. I often think of forests as our most potent example of how natural ecosystems thrive. While I am sure there is an exception out there I am struck by how RARE it is to see a weed in a forest. Our unusual practices of tilling and killing soil makes this most unusual of circumstance where we "need" to chemically treat our fields because of weeds that we promoted in the first place! I wrote a light-hearted post series about that wonderful bristlecone pine you described at the White Mountains in the Sierras. LMK if you are interested and I'll post a link.
Very well analyzed! Pine woes are quite common in India too, where commercial species have replaced indigenous ones and some even play a huge role in the spread of forest fires going out of hand.
Thanks. It's amazing the places that pines have been planted. The only place in India I've been is Kerala, where I saw old palm plantations. I wish that foresters would look more closely at local conditions and species. But the commercial concerns always seem to come first.
Wow. I’ve run into this before, a native rarity here in California that grows abundantly elsewhere. Melanie, the Monterey pine is native to only a small portion of coastal California, although people have planted it in other places in the state. There are lots of them around San Francisco.
The pine nonetheless has a California Native Plant Society ranking of 1B.1: rare, threatened, or endangered in California and elsewhere. The cones are serotinous; they remain closed until opened by the heat of a fire.
The Monterey pines growing in New Zealand must be cultivars, as the wood from the ones growing here are useless for lumber.
Thanks for a terrific post!
That's fascinating, Paul. I never realised that they weren't considered good timber in their native range. Yes, they must be cultivars. There's been a lot of breeding of radiata for different sites and situations. It's a low quality timber, mostly good for pulp and wood products, but if treated can be used in construction of houses.
Fascinating to think it's actually considered a threatened species in California. Hard to imagine here.
I've got more on pines to come, there are a range of species which have been planted here, and some of them have proven particularly troublesome.
Melanie, I grew up in the eastern part of the United States, where the forests are largely deciduous hardwood forests. In the West, pine woodlands dominate. I cna understand your mixed feelings about them, but I love pines. I love the way they smell, their ability to stay green all year long, and some of the forms of the different trees can be quite beautiful. I'm eager to read more of your writing on these interesting trees!
Thanks Paul. I actually visited some pine forest today (as well as some intact native forest) and had an adorable surprise. High in a pine tree was a dear little miromiro or tomtit, a native species which is not technically threatened but you'd never see near a town or anything like that. I'm also planning another visit to pine forest on Thursday and so plan to write more about them after that.
I love the smell of pines too. They smell like Christmas to most New Zealanders, because they are basically our only option if you want a real Christmas tree.
Great story. Sometimes invasive species wind up benefiting endangered species, as in this story about pines and scotch broom (related to gorse) and the Humboldt marten in Oregon's coastal dunes. https://hakaimagazine.com/features/trapped-between-pavement-and-the-pacific/
We've got cases like that in New Zealand. In one notable case, a new species of wētā (a giant flightless grasshopper) was found living in a patch of gorse. Obviously it had once been a forest species, but now its only home was a patch of one of our worst invasives. But the reason gorse was so good for it was because the spines of gorse kept out all the invasive predators that ate the wētā to extinction everywhere else it had once lived.
Our native karearea (falcon) does quite well in pine forest, it likes the mosaic of tall trees and cutover patches.
In my experience there are always some native species that can make the best of the opportunities available, and that includes invasives. But there are other species which are being driven to extinction. It's a good reminder that any management programme has to look carefully at the whole picture.
Thanks for clarifying the issues around carbon sequestration. I had thought that for carbon credits purposes, trees could never be harvested unless the credits were paid back, but maybe this is not the case. If the harvested timber is used, (effectively continuing to store C) there must still be an enormous amount of wastage (which goes back into the atmosphere). What is the % yield from a harvested tree? Another question I've wondered about is the amount of ongoing carbon sequestration occurring in mature forests - with the carbon from rotting trees being stored by microorganisms in the accumulating topsoil. Any comments on this?
I'm still getting my head around some of the details and am in the process of sorting out an interview with a scientist who studies carbon sequestration. I'm not sure at this stage how much is stored and how much is released, but I'm hoping to find this out.
There is definitely ongoing carbon sequestration in mature forests with a lot of carbon ending up in the soil. Off the top of my head, there's a lot more carbon stored in soil than there is in live trees. It's one reason that it's critically important to preserve existing forest, we can't just replace the carbon sequestration in a few decades of growing new trees.
So interesting - I've never thought of pines as an invasive species, but I suppose in some areas they are. Pine forests are beautiful to my eyes when covered in snow; one of the few times I ever enjoyed skiing (and boy, did I try to enjoy it!) was while traversing a fairly flat, snow-laden, and magically quiet pine forest.
That's true - I've been in the mountains in the snow among invasive pines and they did actually look lovely (even though I was there to cut them down). I'm planning a walk in a pine forest in a couple of days, so I'm interested to see if that has the same effect on me as being among the native rainforest where I was earlier today.
Great piece, Melanie! I do love a diverse pine forest, one with undergrowth and a variety of trees sprinkled throughout. Here in the south our forests are mostly hardwood with small pockets of pines occasionally. Then there are the plantations of pines planted for lumber, which always seem spooky to me -- unnaturally straight rows, very dark, mainly filled with poison ivy and carpeted with pine needles. Thanks for the deep dive into a pine I'm not familiar with!
I really hope I'll get to visit a proper pine forest someday. I've made some visits to plantations over the last week, and they haven't delighted me, but I'm sure there's something different about a natural forest.
Melanie. This was interesting to read your struggles with our sometimes reinvention of what is natural in our forests. I enjoy pine forests. I often think of forests as our most potent example of how natural ecosystems thrive. While I am sure there is an exception out there I am struck by how RARE it is to see a weed in a forest. Our unusual practices of tilling and killing soil makes this most unusual of circumstance where we "need" to chemically treat our fields because of weeds that we promoted in the first place! I wrote a light-hearted post series about that wonderful bristlecone pine you described at the White Mountains in the Sierras. LMK if you are interested and I'll post a link.