California Is Home Trees, Perhaps you’ve heard this piece of state lore: California is home to the tallest, largest and oldest trees in the world.
Well, it turns out to be true, with some qualification. The tallest tree of all is Hyperion, a coastal redwood in Humboldt County, exceeding the Statue of Liberty in height. General Sherman in Sequoia National Park is the biggest tree on the planet by volume. And Methuselah, a bristlecone pine in east-central California that is believed to be a stunning 4,855 years old, is generally considered the oldest living tree in the world. California Is Home Trees, California has its geography, size, unique climate and a big dose of chance to thank for this impressive arboreal distinction. Researchers in Chile recently revealed that they may have discovered a tree even older than Methuselah, though its age has yet to be officially verified. “I think it’s part of the California story — the land of superlatives,” said Edward Smith, a forest ecologist for The Nature Conservancy’s California Program. I recently drove from Los Angeles to Bishop, an outpost popular with wilderness tourists in Inyo County, to visit the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest, home to Methuselah. The hallowed wood, 10,000 feet above sea level in the White Mountains, is the first place scientists discovered living trees older than 4,000 years old. The forest is otherworldly, nestled in a harsh alpine desert where the air is thin and everything is quiet.
On previous vacations I had hiked through California’s redwood and sequoia forests, and here I marveled that the ancient bristlecones too were within the state’s borders. “In California, we’re blessed with these extreme, charismatic flora,” said Brandon Pratt, professor of biology at California State University, Bakersfield. He described his first trip to see Methuselah this way: “For a plant biologist, it’s as near to a spiritual experience as you can get.” Pratt and other experts told me that the state had an incredible amount of plant diversity because of its many latitudes and climates. California Is Home Trees, California is also one of five places on earth with a Mediterranean-type climate ecosystem, known to foster unusually high levels of plant and animal diversity. “We have as much of the climactic variation in this single state as we do almost across the entire continent of North America,” said Todd Dawson, professor of ecology and plant biology at University of California, Berkeley. “You’re taking all of the climates and all of the habitats that could be across North America and compressing them into just a single state, so it creates all these really amazing habitats.” The redwoods thrive in misty forests along the coast in the northern half of the state. The giant sequoias grow inland on the fire-prone slopes of the Sierra Nevada. And the Great Basin bristlecone pines eke out an existence at elevations so high and arid that few other plants and animals can survive.
Source: This news is originally published by nytimes