Hannah Chinn
speaker
88 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard May 2025
Hannah Chinn’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
They're going to freeze these little baby trees? Yeah, it's so that they can keep the trees in storage until the ground is like ready to plant.
But yeah, basically. What are these seedling popsicles for? Okay, so you already know that forests are really important for the ecosystem, right?
Yeah, right. But they're in danger due to things like over-harvesting and increasing wildfires. So that's why we need reforestation. replanting new forests to replace the old ones. So Emily, these seedling popsicles are part of a reforestation master plan that the Forest Service is carrying out across the West Coast.
It's a plan that looks into the future to help our forests survive increased heat, changing weather patterns, and other potential threats that they might face.
Yeah, I guess compared to China, it is relatively new. But if you do the math, we've been replanting trees for easily more than a century.
But that doesn't necessarily mean it's a simple process.
This is Rob Slaysack. He's a researcher with the U.S. Forest Service. And he says because growing tree seedlings is so complicated, foresters try to really maximize the seedlings' chance of survival.
That involves things like nurturing the seedlings for longer before planting them, or planting the trees more spaced out so that they don't compete for resources, and maybe most importantly, planting local.
She's the manager of the Durina Genetic Resource Center now. But before that, she was working with the Forest Service as a silviculturist, which just means she does tree and forest management.
Yeah, exactly. But Lisa's been working in forest management and conservation for a long time. And in that time, the speed of climate change has really shifted. And foresters are trying to figure out whether this local approach to planting trees needs to shift too.
So in the time that it takes for a seed to be harvested and then planted and then start growing, foresters are realizing the growing conditions in its home might have changed.
And Rob told me this, too.
Seedlings might face drier or more humid conditions. They might need to weather unprecedented heat waves. There's just a bunch of potentially changing conditions that endanger these trees. And that's a real problem for forest management. They're going through the same things we are, these poor trees. Yeah, exactly. But foresters have come up with a way of tackling it.
And this is a project that Rob's leading, the same project that you heard Michelle and her crew packing up those baby tree popsicles for. It's called the Experimental Network for Assisted Migration and Establishment Silviculture, or E-Names for short. I love an acronym.
Okay, Emily, would you believe me if I told you that they were looking into the future?
Okay, fair. I will let the experts explain. Here's Lisa.
This tool is online and it provides multiple different climate models. Each focuses on slightly different things so that silviculturists can make the most informed decision for their specific forest.
That's what the e-names project is doing. It's experimenting with these seed selections, projecting different scenarios for what the climate will look like in the future, and then planting trees accordingly. So you heard them packing up Doug firs in the beginning of this episode, but they've also planted other species, right?
They've got instant cedar, Jeffrey pine, ponderosa pine, sugar pine, western larch, ton of different trees in places all over Oregon and Washington.
In reality, Rob says it's pretty straightforward.
Showing 41–60 of 88 · page 3 of 5
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