After major fire, the race is on to protect what remains of Santa Rosa Island’s Torrey pines

After a fire scorched more than a third of Santa Rosa Island this spring, the race is on to protect what remains of a beloved grove of rare Torrey pines.

The fire sparked in mid-May after a sailor wrecked his boat on the island’s rugged southeastern shore. It grew to more than 18,000 acres, becoming the largest fire ever recorded on the Channel Islands.

The island’s grove of Torrey pine trees, a subspecies found nowhere else on the planet, bore much of the worst damage. Early surveys estimate as much as 80% of the rare trees will perish. Experts with the Santa Barbara Botanical Garden are working on a more complete analysis.

Now, the biggest worry is how intense El Niño-driven rains may erode soil in the charred remains of the grove.

Restoration ecologist Michelle Gados holds Torrey pine seeds gathered from the burn scar.

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Erin Stone

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“ It keeps me up at night,” said Michelle Gados,  a restoration ecologist with the California Institute of Environmental Studies and a lead on the restoration effort. “I just hope it's not as bad as they predict because this would just be really bad timing. … If you get too much too fast, then all that soil could slide down the slopes.”

The pines released thousands of seeds during the fire — more than 14,000 have been collected by Gados’ team, park staff and other partners since the fire, while thousands more seeds remain in the charred soil.

“ So we're really concerned about all that seed being washed out to sea,” Gados said.

She said keeping the soil intact in the grove is key to supporting surviving trees and to planting hundreds of Torrey pines after the rainy season. The goal is to plant 300 to 500 Torrey pines annually over the next four years.

To prevent erosion, biologists, fire crews and dedicated volunteers have been racing for nearly four months to build 500 wattles — essentially 18-foot cigars of rolled-up biodegradable material. The fiber cylinders can be bought pre-made, but on the island, they have to be built from scratch to avoid introducing any nonnative plants. They’re made of a tightly rolled coir blanket, or coconut husk fiber, around five layers of jute fabric. The wattles will be installed in some of the most erosion-prone areas identified in the Torrey pine grove.

“This is kind of a make-your-own option that we have developed through other projects that have been ongoing for about a decade and have worked really well,” said David  Mazurkiewicz,  a wildlife biologist with Channel Islands National Park, and the implementation lead for the post-fire response on Santa Rosa.

He said they expect to have all 500 rolled and installed by the end of October, just as the official rainy season begins.

The charred grove of Torrey pines on Santa Rosa Island as seen from a boat this week. Early surveys estimate 60% to 80% of the trees will perish from the fire. Some trees are showing new growth today, but it's unclear how they'll fare long-term.

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Erin Stone

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Volunteers are key to the effort

Originally, the park was planning to work with fire crews from across the state and country, but a busy fire season across the West pulled those crews elsewhere, Mazurkiewicz said. So dozens of dedicated volunteers have stepped in.

The latest volunteer cohort of about 20 went to the island this week, where for several days they’ll camp and spend their days rolling wattles.

David Rush of Riverside was there for the second time since the fire.

“The Torrey pines, they're the most endangered pine on the planet, so it's a worthy cause,” he said. “We're killing the earth, and just doing, in my own little way, something to help, it's cool.”

Hundreds of wattles will be installed in the Torrey pine grove on Santa Rosa Island to help prevent erosion during winter rains.

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Erin Stone

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Volunteers prepare to roll a wattle made of a coir blanket and five layers of jute on Santa Rosa Island.

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Erin Stone

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Volunteers, including CSU Channel Islands student Carlos Cruz, right, complete the rolling a wattle on Santa Rosa Island.

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Erin Stone

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Carlos Cruz, a first-year student at Cal State Channel Islands, joined this round, too. With Indigenous roots in Oaxaca, Mexico, he felt called to the work to honor and restore land that for millennia was home to and tended by Chumash people.

“ I think that it’s important to understand and … see, as folks residing on spiritual lands, how we could come together,” he said.

On Wi'ma, Santa Rosa Island

The fire is just the latest moment of upheaval in the island’s long history. Birthed from shifting tectonic plates and volcanic lava flows more than 15 million years ago, then eventually named Wi'ma and inhabited by Chumash people for millennia, the island as we know it today was reshaped by European settlers. Experts say the recent fire was made worse by nonnative grasses that have covered it since ranching began here in the mid-1800s, after European settlement.

Nonnative livestock and game species such as feral pigs, cattle, horses, deer and elk destroyed the island’s forest of native oaks and bishop pines, as well as over 75% of the island's native vegetation.

It’s only been in the last decade-and-a-half that, thanks to conservation efforts since the islands became a national park in 1980, native plant and animal life have begun to return, including the once-nearly extinct endemic Santa Rosa Island fox. Mazurkiewicz said officials have not found many carcasses of the foxes in the burn scar, and expect their population to remain stable despite the fire.

A Santa Rosa Island fox.

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Gustav Verdouw

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npgallery.nps.gov

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Park officials have also been working for more than a decade to restore an ancient oak and bishop pine forest, or “cloud forest,” named for the trees’ ability to catch heavy ocean fog and harvest its water, which then condenses and drips to the chaparral below their branches. That ecosystem, essential habitat for native species, is slowly being restored, and was largely untouched by the recent fire.

In areas that were once just dirt, there are now native shrubs like toyon, sage scrub, lupin and lemonade berry. And in recent years, in the absence of nonnative mammals, Torrey pines have actually been growing beyond their traditional footprint on the island as well — some of those seem to have survived the fire.

Cause for hope

In the burn scar, other signs of hope are sprouting. On a recent afternoon,  Mazurkiewicz pointed to light green grass emerging from the charred hillsides.

“All that green is actually native vegetation, and it just was waiting for a little breathing room,”  Mazurkiewicz said.

In some ways, he said, the fire may prove beneficial — by clearing out the invasive nonnative grasses that have choked much of the island’s flora.

A dusting of light green on this burned hillside are native grasses sprouting where invasive, nonnative grasses once dominated.

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Erin Stone

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David  Mazurkiewicz,  a wildlife biologist with Channel Islands National Park, and the implementation lead for the post-fire response on Santa Rosa, describes the importance of installing wattles in the island's charred Torrey pine grove.

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Erin Stone

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LAist

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Native plants like the endemic manzanita — which hasn’t done so well since the fire — as well as other native shrubs, grasses and trees are propagated at the island’s nursery. A newly-built shade house will soon be the home of Torrey pine seedlings that will eventually be replanted in the burn scar.

But for now, how the Torrey pine grove will fare is unclear. One factor that could play a big part in its future is how severe the upcoming rains will be.

“We don’t know  until we get some rain, and we can see whether the trees that are pushing back out are going to hold,”  Mazurkiewicz said. “The grove was heavily impacted. … A lot of those trees are not going to make it. But there's also outliers that look a little more encouraging.”