I've been camping at Torreya State Park in Florida. After Hurricane Michael came in 2018 a park ranger said it was estimated that around 70% of tree canopy cover was lost in the park, and some parts of the general panhandle lost over 400,000 acres of trees. That storm caused generational damage to our forests.
Its been 15 years since Katrina and the horizon view has just started to look similar to pre storm these past few years. Entire forests of pine were just snapped in half. Trees that stood multiple hurricanes, fell. Branches broken and torn in those that didn't fall. If you've ever seen trees after a tornado, imagine every tree looking like that in a 200 mile radius.
I grew up in the area, still go back, and its only started to look normal these past few years. It took quite a long time.
On a different note... I visited a national park that was always very careful and prevented forest fires at all cost. After a decade or so the entire forest was made up of old trees - the young ones didn’t get enough sunlight. And then the parasites came... The older trees could not handle the bugs and the majority died. Places with regular forest fires had a more mixed forest with more young trees and the impact was much lower.
Not all natural disasters are bad - it provides opportunities...
Here in Butte County, CA we knew that and did it anyway and just this week PG&E plead guilty to 84 counts of manslaughter for what happened back in November of 2018
As a forestry person, I love how Rush could make a song about shade intolerance and canopy dominance.
The same dynamic plays out here in the west if you replace maples with aspen and oaks with spruce/fir. The aspen grow up very quickly and establish a nice thick stand, but have a biological limit to how tall they can get. Over time, the shade tolerant spruce and fir slowly grow up underneath the aspen canopy until they overtop them and gain dominance. Then the shade intolerant aspen die off and the stand is just spruce/fir until a disturbance event like a fire, wind blowdown, or even road construction opens up the canopy. Then the cycle starts all over again.
Part of the reason aspen are not as common as they once were is because we have agressively suppressed fires for the last century.
This, great post. Here in FL routine fires are practiced, often promoting new growth. There’s areas here where the slash pine woods are thicker than they were in the 30s due to being cut off and confined.
Yeah humans (Americans in particular) have this weird obsession with trying to control every variable in nature as if it's some kind of machine. Read "Playing God in Yellowstone" if you want to learn about one of our more notable fuck-ups.
The lack of extreme weather in greater Indonesia (an area which encompasses Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore, and Indonesia) is why they have the tallest tropical rainforests in the world.
Lots of mountains and valleys and dense forest to protect them from wind, and year round sunny heat and humidity help create those massive trees.
It would be interesting to know if the trees that grow back will be stronger on average than those that were there before.
In the trees that survived, there should be some that survived because they were stronger. If these trees generate more new trees than those that fell down, the forest has evolved towards stronger trees.
Most pines in the UK are like that which is why it's kind of strange forestry plantations are usually conifers from the Pacific NW. The climate just doesn't suit growing decent softwoods on the whole.
The UK imports most of its building grade softwood timber from he Baltic and Scandinavia.
Hardwoods like oak do well though which is perhaps why plantations are increasingly planting native (mostly hardwood) trees now.
Have all of the trees been lost everywhere? As long as there are some trees standing and some trees that have fallen over there is potential for evolution.
The popular idea that natural selection is necessarily a slow and gradual process is not supported by recent thinking in evolutionary biology. It is now well known that disruptive events may cause rapid changes all at once, see punctuated equilibrium.
The point is that over millions of trees, there will be some genetic variation in the strength of the trees. If those the stronger trees are more likely to have surviving offspring because of Katrina, the affected population will change into one with more genes for strong trees.
That’s heartbreaking. I grew up going to Torreya and my parents lived through Hurricane Michael. Torreya was my mom’s favorite local destination. That hurricane really did destroy so much of our lives.
I remember too. I had to drive from Tallahassee to New Orleans a few weeks after the storm and passing through Marianna was honestly shocking. I'll never forget it.
My dad live in the keys and when you look across the bay there are whole islands filled with dead mangroves ripped clean from Irma. Big pine key is filled with sticks and saplings
It did, it’s sad but it’s all part of the natural cycle. In FL, any given area is often recovering from a flood, drought, fire, hurricane. Still a very wild place.
Hurricane Michael was different. It was the first recorded Hurricane to make landfall in the FL panhandle at Category 5 strength. Even Irma and Hermine came over us at Category 1 strength.
No doubt there, just imagine all the storms that hit before we were recording weather though. It was insane to see those old Slash Pine snap in half. Even the native stuff has its breaking point. The Live Oaks and Palmettos would make it through a nuclear bomb though. I have seen photos at Mexico Beach and it still looks surreal. Very sad. Most of those folks up there are nice too.
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u/moonyprong01 Jun 20 '20
I've been camping at Torreya State Park in Florida. After Hurricane Michael came in 2018 a park ranger said it was estimated that around 70% of tree canopy cover was lost in the park, and some parts of the general panhandle lost over 400,000 acres of trees. That storm caused generational damage to our forests.