Two devastating wildfires that swept through California's Sierra Nevada in 2020 and 2021 killed thousands of giant sequoias. A new University of California, Davis study suggests the losses would have been far worse without prescribed burns.
Published in Nature Communications, the research found that giant sequoias exposed to prescribed fire during the previous 10 years were nearly four times more likely to survive the 2020 Castle Fire and the 2021 KNP Complex Fire than nearby untreated trees.
"Prescribed burns are effective at reducing giant sequoia mortality, even for today's extreme wildfires," said lead author Dan Dixon, who was a UC Davis postdoctoral researcher in Professor Yufang Jin's lab when the study was conducted. "If the goal is protecting giant sequoias, prescribed fire is an essential tool available to managers."
Ancient Giants Built for Fire
Giant sequoias are among the largest and longest-lived organisms on Earth. A single tree can weigh as much as 15 blue whales and survive for more than 3,000 years. In the wild, they grow only on the western slopes of California's Sierra Nevada.
