California State Parks: Clear That Chaparral, We Need to Plant Some Trees in Cuyamaca State Park!

Shaking my head and thinking, “They should know better,” is about the only reaction I can have in this situation.

            In 2003, with humidity hovering around ten percent and foehn desert winds, locally known as Santa Anas, blowing through the canyons and valley at 60 to 70 mile an hour, one of the most destructive series of fires swept through San Diego County. One of these fires, known as the Cedar Fire, burned about a quarter of a million acres. Much of the area that went up in flames was the pine forest and oak woodland in the Cuyamaca Rancho State Park.

            In the intervening years chaparral, mostly ceanothus, has taken root in the old forest stands. This is a natural occurrence after a forest fire. After a disturbance to an ecosystem, such as a fire, plants known as pioneer species will take root. Ceanothus is such a pioneer plant. These plants will reestablish the soil ecology after the disturbance. In time, other species will take root. These secondary succession species will displace the pioneer species. After many years, a forest or other “mature” plant community will once again dominate the landscape. The next big fire or disturbance will set the stage for this to happen all over again. This is a natural cycle. It goes on all the time.

California State Parks Department is trying to ignore this natural process and jumpstart the forest of Cuyamaca by burning and removing the ceanothus and other chaparral and planting pine trees. This is disrupting the natural succession and putting in jeopardy the soil ecology that pioneer species create.

            The chaparral grew from a seed bank that had been in the soil for scores of years. If the these plants are not allowed to mature and produce flowers and seeds, the next time there is a catastrophic fire in the Cuyamacas, there will not be the necessary seed bank to start the pioneer succession, and the natural cycle will be broken.

A path in a chaparral covered canyon. People don't think of this when they think about nature. photo: nobodyhikesinla.com

California State Parks Department is getting money to clear the chaparral and plant the trees. Companies get carbon credits for financing this project, as the trees are carbon sinks as they grow. Ironically, the chaparral has done a fine job of sequestering carbon. As the Parks Department burns and masticates the chaparral, that sequestration is lost.

I suspect that there is also an ecology of aesthetics and expectations in this scenario as well. When people conjure an image of “nature,” alpine forests and hillsides of oaks are often what they see in their mind’s eye. Though it is the plant community that dominates most of California, chaparral is easily dismissed as brush. The psychology of fire—a very complicated topic when it comes to chaparral that I don’t have the time or space to go into here—also plays a part in the general disregard toward chaparral.

When these folks go see nature, they expect to see what they think what nature is, and that’s oaks and pines, so the State Parks of California will give it to them all the sooner. Tourists and campers don’t have the patience that Mother Nature has.

What people think of when they think of nature photo: vrbo.com

There is much more about this, including some of the legal aspects of what is going on in this situation over at the Chaparral Institute.