10,000 years ago and much of the regions in California were covered in evergreen forest, any thought for red wood, and then something pretty remarkable happened about 10,000 years ago. Turning the oak, oak woodland, the oak forest and stayed oak forest right to the present day, about 10,000 years. Next slide. What we’re really starting to understand more and more is that this landscape was fairly, intensely tended by native Americans. There’s a book called Tending the Wild by Kat Everson, I highly recommend any of you to read it. That book pretty much change my view of forest here in California and not elsewhere. By understanding that pretty much everything we’re seeing is the product of thousands of years of very careful native American tending and management. The other remarkable thing about California are these giant trees that we have here. I’ve studied oak forest all over the world and I’ve never seen situations in the wild where oaks would live more than about 200 years. They’re usually very quickly to splice by bays in this area, evergreen trees in other areas, pines have replace oaks. Oaks are early successional tree species, they are the first tree species to come in but then they quickly succeed other trees. The fact that you have some of these oaks that are gigantic and in fact they’ve been aged to the some of them more than a thousand years old is defies most of what I know about ecosystem and ecology. Next slide. So what are we more and more understanding is that the native Americans were not just tending the lands they were actually tending the trees as well, mainly for the purpose, in this case, next slide, acorn production. The native Americans here in California rely very heavily on acorns as a food source. So, next slide, if we understand a lot of their approaches to manage of a land were around maintaining the health of the forest then we can understand why they were doing things such as burning literally every single year around many of these oaks. Now, burning is an excellent management tool for keeping an ecosystem, especially oak ecosystem at an early successional stage. The burn removes a lot of the young trees and brush that might cut out the oak, and also rejuvenates the soils. All systems as they age, all living systems as they age tend to acidify, soils do, our bodies do, the native Americans understood this and they used fire, fire is nature’s way of bringing that ph back into balance. The ash and the fire neutralizes acids that tend to build up in the soils. The other mystery that we have are these mysterious bones and shell fragments that we find concentrated in many of the trees. What’s bizarre is not so much that they’re there, but the extent that we were finding them, this core of mineral shell fragments was found underneath a giant sequoias up in the foot hills of Sierras. Sea shells, all hundreds of miles inland, up thousands of feet elevation, ground up to tiny fragments and we find them layers only concentrated around the giant sequoias. Next slide. We see similar things here around the red woods, these layers of finely ground shells and bones and rocks and ash. Now, again we don’t have any documentation records of native Americans were actually using this as fertilizers, but of course again, we have to remember a lot of information was lost. We are very well aware that when the Severers came we found these piles of shells, they recognize it as an excellent sources of fertilizers. And to this day are using these shells as sources of fertilizers. But I will tell you that there is some other different views outside of that that you haven’t heard about, and these views comes from very prominent scientists. If you like, you should look up Doctor Michael Kofi, Professor Eusi Urgosay. Doctor Michael Kofi is probably what I considered the phytoporal expert in the country, he runs the world phytoporal collection, I’ve worked with Doctor Michael Kofi, he has been trying to funding the study sudden oak death for, I don’t know, how many years now, I was actually on a proposal with him a couple of years ago to get funding to study sudden oak death, and he can't get a penny. And the reason is, as he of the opinion, his expert opinion that sudden oak death fungus probably has been here for a while. It’s not a new and exotic fungus, and that’s really just one, many diseases if I think of forest and the problem is probably more likely changes in nutritional status of the trees and their ability to fight off the disease as oppose to just a simple doing of this one disease. Yet the trees are still dying and there’s still plenty of sudden oak death and still moving around. Probably the reason is that the disease was already in these areas, understand by the year 2000, we didn’t even know phytocoraremora existed. So who’s out there looking at all these areas trying to see if it was there? Probably the range extension of these note that disease was lot due to the fast rapid spread as you’re being told but simply the fact that people all decided knew what to look for, went out started testing and find them.
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