This is one of the fluffiest, least aligned with reality pieces I have ever read on tree propagation, and I've read a lot of silly things about tree propagation.
If I want to propagate 5,000 trees I have a few options. I can do what this article describes, and fiddle with some sort of artisan method for collecting seeds, or I can do two much more realistic things:
Plant 20,000 seeds indiscriminately, knowing full well that many wont germinate, some of the ones that germinate wont reach the true leaf stage, most of the ones that reach the true leaf stage will take a good long while to reach 1', and of those that reach 1' I should expect to lose between 1/6th and 2/3rds in the next 2 years depending on the species, growing area, etc.
Or, more likely:
Take 7,500 cuttings from various different mother plants, propagate them using highly effective methodologies tailored to the specific needs of their species based on datasets that have been honed for decades, and lose roughly 1/3rd to the luck of the draw.
Propagating from seed is something you do when you need the benefits of sexual reproduction and hybridization (look at the chestnut for an example), but if you need a lot of plants in a short period of time you propagate from cutting for many different reasons.
Reforestation is a red herring. Trees don't sequester much if they burn or when they die. Plus, soot from forest fires rapidly accelerates deglaciation and polar ice melting, leading to increasingly-volatile weather as the jet stream patterns destabilize from a lack of cold thermal mass at the poles. Let nature do most of the hard work and sink the results.
The most cost-effective way to solve climate change is automated "farming" of GMO oceanic biomass for CCS.
>a cache of pine cones worth $15 a bushel. These woody cones are in steep demand
A bushel, even of lightweight pine cones, is fairly large at eight gallons. For some varieties*, a bushel of pine cones delivers 1.2 pounds of pine nuts per bushel.
$15 per sounds unlike "steep demand" to me, based on my observation of prices of raw pine nuts in areas I've been where they're harvested by locals. But they provide no justification for their idea, or market context. It just leaves me suspicious.
* https://www.fs.fed.us/eng/ref/seedlings/conecoll/determine.h...
> Over the next 20 years, the U.S. aims to plant billions more trees in order to restore millions of acres of scorched forest and help offset planet-warming carbon emissions. In the West alone, some 10 million acres of recently burned land are waiting to be replanted.
This sounds like a wrong goal at first glance. One of the root causes of the crazy wildfire season we've seen (along with drought) is overpopulation of trees. Lots and lots of fuel close together. From what I've learned Western forests are _supposed_ to be thin and patchy, these forests evolved with fire in it's environment - some trees seeds do not even germinate until after a fire occurs! [0] Unless a trained forester can correct me, from my perspective the best solution is to let regrowth happen naturally for best case long term sustainability.
[0] https://www.nationalforests.org/our-forests/your-national-fo...
I used to collect seeds for the Forest Service as a kid in the 70's. Messy sticky work.
But, for those willing to really get after it, the pay wasn't bad, assuming one doesn't count the DAYS spent getting pitch off of everything, one's own self included!
Can’t find the paper right now, but China has a massive effort underway to tissue culture needle trees for large areas in the West.
Single needle can basically be raised to dozens of seedlings in 3 months, and thus the only way they found to reach the scale they were looking for.
One tree will produce millions of seeds by itself without any human help. They will form into seedlings and grow into trees also without human help.
The issue is that we don't let nature do it's thing and we want trees to be where we say. It's hubris.
Don’t we have a lot more forests in North America than 100 years ago?
I thought this was one of those counter-intuitive stats contrarians like to bring up.
Giant forest fires enter the chat.
I survived the 2018 Camp Fire and moved to the central US where disaster risks are low.
You can't sequester anything if the trees burn or fix soil and desertification if there's no rain. This is more #TeamTrees, Great Green Wall, and Ethiopia clean-tech virtue-signaling.
I wonder if propagation from branches is possible. I know it is extremely hard but surely it could be studied and solutions found to maximize efforts? That and if these seeds are so needed then why isn’t the government paying more to encourage the industry?
How does one become a "skilled seed collector"? Are there jobs for them?
That last picture doesn't look like an organically grown forest to me. More like agriculturally planted trees. I'm not convinced they are doing the right thing. Why not let nature run its course?
You don't have to steal from quirrels, they even plant the trees for free.
> the number of skilled seed collectors in the U.S. has been dwindling, though it’s not clear by how much, since the work is seasonal; it’s also gruelling [sic], for not much pay.
OK, pay people for the work then! This kind of thing always gets framed as a labor or skill shortage, but it's always a pay shortage.
These programs need money, and they need it now! The military has so much money they literally don't know what to do with it. Make them plant some damn trees! Climate security is national security.
This seems like a short term fix prone to all the problems of mono-culture. First pine-beetle infestations brining in disease put all that hard-work to naught.
There is a natural progression to growing forests, how about protecting, and just staying off large swaths of land, using fire treatment and land management techniques as we understand them and let the land restore itself? Perhaps we have to think past 5-10 year windows and start to work at plans that think a minimum of 50 years out. Old-growth forests take easily that long, at minimum, to get started "naturally".