Medford, Ore – In the heart of Southern Oregon’s Fremont-Winema National Forest, crews go to new heights to harvest a precious commodity.
“We’re looking for the ripe cones at the top of the tree,” said Brian Kittler, lead program officer for the Resilient Forests program at the nonprofit American Forests.
With the help of lift operators and climbers, Kittler and his team showed CBS News what his team is hunting for pine cones.
“The more we lose forests, the more we lose our clean air and clean water, our ability to remove carbon from the atmosphere and address climate change,” Kittler said.
The threat comes from the unprecedented kind of megafires in the West, which fueled by climate changehave burned more than 33 million acres since 2020, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. That’s about the size of the state of Arkansas.
If nothing is done to restore a forest after a forest fire, a vicious cycle is created. Means fewer surviving trees fewer pine cones for people to pick and plant. That’s what happened in the Fremont-Winema National Forest during the 2012 Barry Point Fire, Kittler said.
“There are basically no living trees and no natural regeneration taking place,” Kittler said.
Once the pine cones are collected, they are taken to a network of nurseries, where the seeds are extracted and grown into seedlings. One million seedlings will plant approximately 4,500 hectares of new forest.
But the program alone isn’t enough to restore the forest, said Brian Reatini, a geneticist with the US Forest Service. He says they’re about 200,000 acres short — and that’s just in part of Oregon.
The warming environment also means fewer seedlings are likely to grow to maturity, which takes about twenty years.
“It’s become much drier, hotter, drier. One of the consequences of that is it can push trees to the edge of what they can physiologically tolerate,” Reatini said.
To help combat that problem, they buy seeds from more “drought tolerant” tree species.
The demand for shares now requires all hands on deck. Logging companies like Collins Pine help the Forest Service collect pine cones and clear scorched ground for replanting.
“Fire and ecology and insects and disease – we are not concerned with a property line. So if we can replant our little patch of land, but we’re surrounded by untreated, burned forestland, it’s just going to end up being a disaster. a brush field and it will burn again and threaten our land again,” said Galen Smith, the company’s vice president of raw materials.
Neighbors are helping neighbors in a program the Forest Service hopes to expand to other affected states.
When he looks at the seedlings, Kittler says he sees “the forests that our children and our children’s children will walk through.”
