The impacts of beetle kill and fire in the San Juan Mountains have prompted the U.S. Forest Service to collect and store vast amounts of native seeds for future reforestation efforts.
Two contracted tree climbers took advantage of a narrow window of favorable conditions in the high country during two weeks in August to gather spruce tree cones from trees around Beaver Meadows, Coal Bank Pass, Missionary Ridge and Wolf Creek.
Gretchen Fitzgerald, a forester at the Columbine Ranger District in Bayfield, said the effort to collect spruce tree cones has come up short the past few years, but she said this year crews were successful.
The crew out of Washington state was able to gather 95 bushels of cones, which will be sent to a storage facility in Nebraska should the future need arise to reforest areas in the San Juans.
“A lot of that was due to a natural cycle,” Fitzgerald said of the uptick in spruce tree cones. “But the trees are also stressing, and then produce a stress crop. They know they’re dying, and it’s sort of a last hurrah to produce extra seed.”
Since 1996, nearly 588,000 acres in the Rio Grande National Forest and 120,000 acres in the San Juan National Forest have fallen prey to the spruce beetle scourge, the latest Forest Service data shows.
In response, the Forest Service, when the agency deems it appropriate, will hold a logging sale in areas that have been hit by beetle kill, and are easily accessible.
After such sales, forest managers are tasked with the decision: let regrowth occur naturally or replant native species?
The seed bank comes into play when an area has been selected for reforestation, Fitzgerald said. The agency has strict guidelines – down to the species, elevation and year – on what plants can be used.
For the spruce tree cones collected this summer, Fitzgerald said the agency is looking at reforesting areas of Wolf Creek and Beaver Meadows, as well as Middle Mountain near Vallecito Lake, which suffered a beetle kill last year.
The stored seedlings also are effective in addressing areas harmed by wildfire, evidenced by a successful reforestation in areas ravaged by the 2002 Missionary Ridge Fire, she said.
There, the Forest Service is finishing a three-year reforestation project that includes replanting 780-acres near Vallecito Lake with about 250 ponderosa pine and Douglas fir trees per acre.
Seeds gathered in 1988 were used for that project, Fitzgerald said.
“San Juan has been pretty good about maintaining seed bank,” she said. “There are some other districts I know of that are panicking because they don’t have these collections.”
The collection this year cost the Forest Service $230,000, but fees for storage only incur when the agency calls the facility to process the seed at a rate of 63 cent a seedling.
And while the gathering of tree seedlings has been relatively successful in the San Juans, throughout the country, there’s virtually no research on the gathering of native shrubs or grass.
“It’s a funding issue,” Fitzgerald said. “That sort of research hasn’t been done on the shrubs, and it’s even worse for the grasses.”
Fitzgerald stressed the importance of collecting native seeds as a plan for the uncertain future of forests in the West.
“We don’t know what the climate is going to do and how climate change will affect our forests,” she said. “So we need to collect a wide variety of tree species across the forest just to be prepared to be able to respond to future disturbances – fire beetle or whatever – and still maintain a forest.”
