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Fire Mgmt. Policy
Fire and Park Resources
Annual Fire Reports
Giant Sequoia Management Issues:
Protection, Restoration, and Conservation
Nate Stephenson
National Biological Service
Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks
Three Rivers, California
As a result of recent changes in U.S. Forest Service (USFS) policy, the two public agencies that collectively manage most giant sequoia groves - the USFS and the National Park Service - now share remarkably similar sequoia management goals: to protect, restore, and conserve giant sequoia ecosystems for their non-commodity values. The goal of greatest immediate importance is to protect sequoia groves from unusually severe wildfires; the hazard of such fires has increased with the accumulation of forest fuels during a century of fire exclusion. By reducing surface fuels, tree density, and the vertical continuity of aerial fuels, restoration of pre-Euroamerican grove conditions automatically confers a good deal of protection from extreme wildfires. Managers wishing to restore pre-Euroamerican grove conditions face at least four complex issues: (1) defining specific restoration goals (e.g. is the goal simply to restore low- to moderate- intensity fire as a natural process, letting it determine forest structure, or to mechanically restore a particular forest structure before reintroducing fire?), (2) describing the physical targets for restoration (what was the range of pre-Euroamerican grove conditions?), (3) evaluating the practicality and possibility of re-creating the target grove conditions (can we restore past conditions, given the limitations imposed by present grove conditions?), and (4) choosing specific restoration tools and approaches (what are the trade-offs among using prescribed fire, saws, or both as restoration tools?).
Once groves have been protected and restored a conservative approach to assuring their long-term sustainability is to maintain the processes that sustained them in the past, especially frequent low- to moderate-intensity surface fires. Undisturbed hydrology is also important, thus special management attention should focus on the local watershed above and adjacent to groves. There is no evidence that the long-term sustainability of giant sequoia ecosystems as a whole depends on adding to the public land base. Continuing and future threats to sequoia ecosystems include air pollution, unnatural effects of pathogens, and anthropogenic climatic change.
Present conditions in many sequoia groves demand immediate attention - particularly the ongoing failure of giant sequoia regeneration and the accumulation of hazardous fuels. Yet our present understanding of grove restoration and conservation is imperfect, meaning that management must move forward in spite of uncertainties. Success therefore depends on managers practicing adaptive management, which formalizes the common-sense process of trying something, seeing what happens, learning from the experience, then trying something new. Successful adaptive management depends on monitoring the results of different management actions, a step that is often ignored. Within certain bounds, there is no single clearly correct approach to grove restoration and conservation; thus, the different sequoia management agencies are likely to apply a variety of different management approaches. Knowledge will grow most rapidly if the various agencies cooperate in comparing the consequences of their different management approaches.
For the agencies managing giant sequoias, meeting obligations to protect, restore, and conserve sequoia ecosystems will be difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. Efforts seem sure to fail unless there is strong institutional support at all levels, including significant permanent base funding.
