Highest Jeffrey pines ever recorded reflect a warming climate in the high Sierra.
Highest Jeffrey pines ever recorded reflect a warming climate in the high Sierra.
UC Davis Professor Hugh Safford was hiking for pleasure in California’s High Sierra when he stumbled upon a new elevation record for the Jeffrey pine, which may now be the state’s highest-altitude tree. His serendipitous finding is published in Madroño, a journal of the California Botanical Society.
Last September, at timberline along the south slopes of Mount Kaweah in Sequoia National Park, Safford paused to admire a foxtail pine, then a lodgepole pine — trees he expected to see at such high elevations.
“Then I thought, ‘What’s that?’” said Safford, a forest ecologist in the UC Davis Department of Environmental Science and Policy. “I walk over, and it’s a Jeffrey pine! It made no sense. What is a Jeffrey pine doing above 11,500 feet?”
Read more at University of California - Davis
Photo Credit: David Prasad via Wikimedia Commons
