Medford, Oregon – In the heart of the Fremont-Winema National Forest in southern Oregon, crews are going to new heights to harvest a precious commodity.
“We're looking for ripe cones at the top of the tree,” said Brian Kittler, chief program officer for the Resilient Forest program at the nonprofit conservation group American Forests.
Using lift operators and climbers, Kittler and his team showed CBS News how their team hunts Pine cones,
“The more we lose forests, the more we lose our clean air and clean water, our ability to remove carbon from the atmosphere and deal with climate change,” Kittler said.
The threat comes from the West's unprecedented type of megafire, which driven by climate changeIt has destroyed more than 33 million acres since 2020, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. It is around the size of the state of Arkansas.
If nothing is done to restore the forest after a wildfire, a vicious cycle begins. means fewer living trees low pine cone For humans to pick and plant. That's what happened in the Fremont-Winema National Forest during the Barry Point Fire in 2012, Kittler said.
“There are basically no living trees there, and no natural regeneration happening,” Kittler said.
Once the pine cones are collected, they are brought to a network of nurseries, where the seeds are extracted and the seedlings are prepared. A new forest will be planted in about 4,500 acres with one million saplings.
But the program alone is not enough to restore the forest, said Brian Rattini, a geneticist with the U.S. Forest Service. They say they're about 200,000 acres short – and that's just in one part of Oregon.
The warming climate also means that fewer plants will grow to maturity, which takes about 20 years.
“It's become much drier, hotter and drier. One of the consequences of that, it can push trees toward the limits of what they can physically tolerate,” Rettini said.
To help combat that problem, they are obtaining seeds from more “drought tolerant” tree species.
Now everyone needs to be alert for the demand for stocks. Logging companies like Collins Pine are helping the Forest Service source pine cones and clear scorched lands for replanting.
“Fire and ecology and insects and disease – it doesn't care about the property line. So if we're able to replant our little section of land, but we're surrounded by untreated, burned forest land, eventually that's just It's going to be a brush area and it's going to burn again and put our lands at risk again,” said Galen Smith, the company's vice president of resources.
Neighbors helping neighbors in a program that the Forest Service hopes to expand to other affected states.
When he looks at the plants, Kittler said he sees “forests that our children and our children's children will pass through.”
