Tuesday April 23, 2024
LAist —
Over the past decade or so, California’s forests took a beating as more than 170 million trees died, many weakened by drought and extreme heat, and killed off by beetles and disease. Others were destroyed by fires.
Now that we have two wet winters on the books, soils are saturated, the snowpack is sufficiently dense and we may start to see some decent recovery.
“I expect to see a pretty dramatic decrease in fir mortality and conifer mortality overall this year due to nice precipitation years back to back,” said Jeffrey Moore, who’s been documenting California’s tree mortality from the air since 2009, as the aerial detection survey program manager for the U. S. Forest Service. He’ll begin performing the 2024 survey in July.