Op-Ed: We'll have to sacrifice Joshua trees to save them (via latimesopinion)
Unlike coast redwoods or giant sequoias, they largely escaped harvesting and habitat losses when Europeans colonized their home. They flourished, in fact, until the last decades of the 20th century brought sprawling development and a changing climate.
There are refugia in the higher elevations of Joshua Tree National Park, but up to half of them have burned in recent decades. Another likely refuge was decimated by last year’s Cima Dome fire in the Mojave National Preserve, which incinerated as many as a million Joshua trees. Restoring populations after these losses will take decades.
Many of these farms can be built without compromising pristine Joshua tree habitat, but there is no doubt that the scale of development needed to bring climate change under control will be enormous. Ironically, building the renewable energy capacity we desperately need to avert more severe climate change may be, in some cases, in direct conflict with Joshua trees’ capacity to survive climate change.
To decide which Joshua trees need focused protections, we must dramatically improve our collection of on-the-ground information about the health of Joshua tree populations across the Mojave: which ones are successfully growing new seedlings and which are faltering. We also need genetic data of a quality that has rarely been gathered in other threatened species, to pinpoint gene variants that allow Joshua trees to weather the harshest conditions.
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