In this interview with the lead author of Wildflowers of the Trinity Alps, Ken DeCamp shares stories about the book and how he became a photographer and naturalist. Hopefully his thoughts inspire you to get out on a wildflower adventure this year!
Continue ReadingObligate & Facultative Seeding Manzanitas
Last weekend, I hiked in Trinity County along a low-elevation, fire-prone section of the Bigfoot Trail between Highway 3 and Hayfork and was able to witness obligate & facultative seeding in action.
From Field Guide to Manzanitas, Backcountry Press, 2012
One-third of manzanita species are facultative seeders. These are species that regenerate post-fire by both seed and burl resprouting. The remainder are obligate seeders that lose their entire adult population in a fire and depend on a seed bank for regeneration. Obligate seeding is the current model in manzanita evolution.
To understand why, consider the climatic dynamics over thousands, or tens of thousands of years or more. In the case of the resprouting species, particular individuals can live for centuries, resprouting over and over, cloning new individuals as the burls expand with each fire cycle. But in that population, the rate of genetic change is limited, because most individuals live a long time by way of asexual reproduction. This suggests that populations may be unable to respond to rapid climatic changes that might occur in only hundreds of years. The obligate seeders, on the other hand, lose all adults in stand-replacing fires and new post-fire generations have to establish from more genetically diverse seeds. Those populations consequently have greater flexibility to shift and adjust as circumstances require; traits that might have been rare and less important in older generations can emerge through natural selection and become critical in the newer generations within the lifetime of resprouting manzanitas.
Much of this area burned in the summer of 2015. While evidence of the fires were everywhere, there are many signs of the next generation of plants returning to the landscape. This was particularly true on some of the south-facing slopes above Philpot Campground where two species of manzanitas were exploring different reproductive regimes– both obligate & facultative seeding.
[one_half]
[/one_half]
[one_half_last]
[/one_half_last]
Nature Notes:
Discovering Douglas-fir
I took my son hiking today and I am proud to say he loves looking at trees, exploring the forest, and playing at our fort. Here he is identifying a Douglas-fir cone…
Conifers of the Pacific Slope is a contemporary field guide built to assist plant lovers in identifying one of the most intriguing and ancient groups of plants in the world. Conifers survive within the West’s most spectacular environments—from the coastal temperate rainforests to the highest mountain summits.
Forest Pathogens
Select Forest Pathogens of California’s Klamath Mountains
Download
Forest Pathogens often go unnoticed while exploring, but offer an exceptional window into the intricacies of forest ecology when better understood. I created free document linked below in 2010 while in Grad School at Humboldt State. Forest Pathology was one of the more interesting classes I took while turning Conifer Country into my thesis for a Master’s Degree in Biology. Most of the information for this document was taken from Terry Henkel’s lecture notes as well as from internet and book sources–all cited within the document. I was recently reminded of this creation because of the October weather that has dropped unprecedented amounts of rain and nurtured fungal growth across Northwest California.
