Exploring the Parallels of Oak Woodlands: Insights and Resilience from California to Spain with Dr. Lynn Huntsinger

The following interview was recorded for the Poor Proles Almanac podcast with guest Dr. Lynn Hunsinger. We're going to be talking about ecology and rangeland management, specifically in California. Her primary book, “Working Landscapes the Spanish Dehesas and California Ranches” (available for download here), looks at the similar and different characteristics of these two unique ecologies and how we can learn from the Dehesa model for what California's climate looks like today and what it will look like in the future, providing something of a blueprint for what the future holds and what tools we should begin to utilize as climate change accelerates on the landscape.

Andy:

Lynn, thank you so much for taking the time to chat. Please tell us a little bit about yourself and your work.

Dr. Lynn Huntsinger:

Thanks very much, Andy. I'm really pleased to be able to talk with you about one of my favorite subjects today. I'm a professor of range ecology and management at the University of California, Berkeley, and that means the ecology of grasslands, woodlands, and shrublands.

Andy:

I came across your name because of a book you wrote called Mediterranean Oak Woodland Working Landscapes. This book essentially compared Spain to California in terms of rangelands. It was a really interesting book from an ecological perspective, but it also really thoroughly addressed the challenges of trying to compare things that might superficially be very similar. So, first, I want to ask what spurred this project.

Dr. Lynn Huntsinger:

Well, a number of us were doing research in Spain and looking at the Dehesa and how the woodlands of Spain are managed and they are, you know, they look a lot like California woodlands. So I think what you said in your introduction is very interesting. To talk about what is like alike and what is pretty interesting. But we were doing research there, and I always wanted to do research there. It has a similar climate to California's Mediterranean. It has a Mediterranean climate, which is unusual in the United States. So, to find similar climates elsewhere in the world, there are not very many. So Spain is a good opportunity to do research, and one of the primary collaborators is quite fluent in Spanish and, in fact, grew up there. So that was very useful.

And we got a small grant, and we invited a group of Spanish scientists to come over to the United States, to California, and we did this amazing thing, which we called the Spanish tour, all up and down California looking at our oak woodlands and grasslands, because they have oak woodlands and grasslands too. That's what the Dehesa is, and we just really enjoyed that and then started thinking about how to compare them and what we could do research-wise to compare them and what country or an area like ours that's only been that has a completely different history from the Dehesa in Spain, that there's been a human influence that's transferred across the ocean, as well as very similar climate.

So it was really fun. I'd say that the main reason we wanted to do this is that we thought it was fascinating, and we had a lot of fun doing it. So we tried to pair Spanish researchers with Californian or American researchers in each chapter. We also had some from other places in Europe who worked in Spain. I wrote I was one of the editors, and I also wrote parts of various chapters, including the introduction, which is my favorite.

But I'm glad you like it. It's a wonderful book. I love looking through it. If I'm wondering how many acorns California oaks produce or how many acorns Spanish oaks produce since they are a very valuable source of forage for animals and food for humans, I can look it up in that book, and I like that a lot.

Andy:

Yeah, it dives in really deep on oaks. I mean you could just write a book that large on oaks, but I don't think that exists at this point, but this is probably as close as I've seen. You guys spent a lot of time focusing on oaks and acorns specifically and they have such a different use over in Spain compared to traditional indigenous people here in the US. Yes, and you talk about that a little bit in terms of, I believe, it's the blue oaks that you guys have over in California.

Dr. Lynn Huntsinger:

Well, we have 13 different kinds of oaks, and indigenous Californians had a hand in managing all of them.

Andy:

Yeah, I was thinking more like the Berkeley area where you guys are. It's blue over there. Well, I'm trying to remember the map.

Dr. Lynn Huntsinger:

Actually, since we're on the coast and to the north, our most common oak is Coast Live Oak. But you do see blue oaks up here intermixed. I'd say where you see the most blue oaks is in the Sierra foothills, the west side of the Sierra. There's quite a lot. We have a lot here too. Almost everywhere, it's a mix.

Andy:

Yeah, I think oaks, I think, are the most biologically diverse tree in North America. I meant like the most different types of varieties.

Dr. Lynn Huntsinger:

Oh, I don't know, not a forester, I can't tell you, but there are a lot of them and they hybridize a lot. I guess when I think of another kind of tree. Well, there are a lot of different conifer species and pine species.

Andy:

The research focused on a couple of different areas. The ones that I thought were really interesting were the grazing patterns and how trees relate to the ground cover, particularly when trees were getting cleared, how that impacted soil, organic matter, how it improved over the short term, the quality of forage, and things like that.

I'm interested in, for example, California's different history in terms of having been cleared in a different way than Spain. Is there anything so far that you've taken from this book and started to actually apply or impact how regulations work around any of this type of stuff?

Dr. Lynn Huntsinger:

Okay, so in Spain, the oak woodlands, the Dehesa, is a human-created phenomenon and it's created from what would be quite brushy, and oaks are selected and pruned and grown well-spaced. So I think there's a paper by Joffrey et al. about the Dehesa of Spain as an ecosystem mimic, and it looks at the distribution of oaks in Spain. And so if you look at Dehesa in Spain, in the north, you might, I think, it was like 60 oaks per hectare, and in the south, it's more like 20 because it's controlled by the amount of moisture that the Dehesa gets and the ideal is for the oaks to be far enough apart so that their roots don't compete with each other and so that they don't shade the grass because the idea is to have the grass be plentiful and abundant because the Dehesa is largely used for grazing of all kinds of different animals.

There's been a lot of new work, you know. One of them was a paper where they showed that the Dehesa is pretty much the most fire-resistant landscape in Spain because the trees are fairly far apart and the grasses are kept fairly short by grazing, so it becomes a very not only beautiful, I mean, it's so beautiful In the spring in Spain, the flowers are absolutely gorgeous and of course grazing stimulates these flowers, a lot of flowers in our kinds of grasslands and so you can see a pasture by pasture. One will be all purple flowers, and one will be yellow and white. It's just beautiful and also incredibly fire-resistant. So I think there are some things to learn there. Native Americans, native Californians, I can't speak for them, but I have been spending a fair amount of time looking at Native American practices lately. There's a woman named Kat Anderson who wrote a book on it called Tending the Wild, a fantastic book.

Andy:

Yeah, it's a great one.

Dr. Lynn Huntsinger:

Yeah, it's great. Also, Before The Wilderness by Blackburn and Anderson was the first one of these, and it's so eye-opening. It was when I first read it, but the Native Americans were kind of doing that, too my impression is that they wanted to maximize acorn production because it was a huge staple food. Acorns are very rich in carbohydrates and fat, and carbohydrates, in particular, are hard to get from a gathering or hunting and sort of food source livelihood; in fact, I think it was the acorn that made it very possible not to do too much cultivation some cultivation but in Mediterranean areas the acorns are such a rich supply of food so if you know how to eat them, don't rush out and eat one. No, they have to be treated because they're slightly toxic. But they used fire, and by all accounts, in many areas of California, we have more oaks than we've had before. On the remaining open lands, open landscapes, some have fewer. You know it depends. A lot of things affect oaks.

We like to say things affect oaks. We like to say everything eats oaks. But in native California the idea was to maximize oak production. So the open woodlands were very valuable, and a lot of burning was used and other forms of management, particularly to keep out conifers, to keep out brush, and to create an open landscape where every oak is very healthy. When they get really close together they're not so healthy, just like our pine forests. Now our conifer forests are suffering so much from being crowded. So, native California was that was created a lot of abundance because those open woodlands are also very high in biodiversity because they have both an understory and an overstory, and the grass is important for game To us today. It's also important for grazing for many people, including many tribes. However, a balance between the woodlands and the grasslands in California has a lot of advantages for biodiversity. So native California was managed that way.

We've changed the oak woodlands a fair amount. We've changed the water balance by draining the valley and controlling the water there, and we have cleared oaks in the whole central valley for crop production. So, a lot of oaks are gone. We have the richest, most productive farmland, I believe, in the United States, if not the world, and so it came from what used to be pretty much oak woodland and grassland, and so that was cleared. We are clear now primarily for development.

People who raise livestock will leave oaks, and I had a friend who interviewed rancher Mitch McLaren in the 80s and asked them you know, if you remove these oaks, you'll have more grass. Wouldn't that be better? Why don't you remove them? And what they said? This may not be popular with your listeners, but what they said is I want it to look like a ranch, not a farm. Anyway, they too, and today too, love the scenery and the beauty of the oak woodlands, as our native communities do too.

Managing for that intermediate level of canopy has turned out to be incredibly wise on all fronts. The oaks you mentioned they're like little islands of nutrients. They pump water from deep in the soil and use it to make their leaves, and then those leaves drop, either all at once if they're deciduous or just gradually over time. So they provide nutrients and water. They don't compete so much with the grass because they draw from deeper down than the grass will ever get. They're amazing. They have these huge tap roots, and so they they're paired very well. It's a very nice pairing of plants, I have to say, and so are their nutrient pumps.

The shade, actually, it turns out in much of the state, especially the drier parts, actually benefits grass growth. If it's an open kind of canopy but still shady a little bit, it creates a moisture microclimate under the oaks. So now we know that Bill Frost did a lot of this research. We now know that those sparse oaks, or, more widely spread, savanna and woodland, actually increase forage production, at least expand the green season to be longer. The grass under the oaks, I think you can see that sometimes of the year you see this green. It might even green up earlier because it might be a little warmer under the oaks, and you see these circles of green under the oaks at some times a year. It's really, really neat, and they also provide fog drip. We do have fog, especially along the coast, so it works pretty well.

There's a recent paper, I think it's coming out or has come out, that talks about that's also the richest carbon sequestration in the grassland, which is important because those woodlands are fire resistant, and right now you know we've been using, we've been concentrating on forests as places where we're going to sequester carbon and save it, but they keep burning down, keep burning down. That doesn't do it. You know, last year I think it was 2020, California sequestered 4 million megatons. You can look this up from CalEPA because I may get it wrong, but 4 million megatons of carbon was lost and emitted. Excuse me, 4 million megatons of carbon emitted, and that has been an improvement because California has been working really hard to reduce its emissions. But not counted in that is 100 million megatons of emissions from wildflowers.

Andy:

Oh, wow.

Dr. Lynn Huntsinger:

So I mean, I would like to see our forests managed to be more fire resistant as well, but the oak woodlands can be managed that way, and it's high in biodiversity, resistant to fire, and provides good forage for animals and livestock, so why not? So there are some things to be learned from the Spanish about how they accomplish that. If you look at an oak woodland in California now most of them you'll see that the woodlands tend to be clustered where there's water often. Sometimes, they're very evenly spread, but often, you see that they're following water courses up. So I'm not sure if that's probably because there's water but also because a lot more of the land in California has been cultivated previously than you might think.

Andy:

Yeah.

Dr. Lynn Huntsinger:

In this area, a lot of land that we think of as natural was at least cultivated for a few years before people figured out that the rain is very unreliable here. Yeah, rain-fed ag. So it's all in the valley where they have irrigation and along the coast.

Andy:

Yeah, even here in New England, we have protected woodlands and things like that. All of this was cleared out in the 19th century, and a lot of it was even cleared out in the 20th century. So you go out into a woodland, and it's only a hundred years old. There's not too much. That's actually. I'm not even talking about old-growth but older-growth forests here.

Dr. Lynn Huntsinger:

If you look at the eastern half of the United States, it was deforested for a while, practically, and then boom, your forest came back. Ours aren't quite so fast.

Andy:

Yeah, and it's mostly those first early succession forests with a lot of the problems you had spoken about, such as the very tight canopy, which ultimately doesn't really benefit the forest in the long run, and a lot of that traditional environmentalism that is hands-off. That's like nature will do its thing, and that's not how our ecosystems have evolved, and it does erase a lot of those histories.

Dr. Lynn Huntsinger:

That is absolutely true.

Andy:

Why is the soil quality, despite the Dehesas being good farming systems, not that good compared to California?

Dr. Lynn Huntsinger:

Well, it's been used. I don't know, I'll just say right off the bat, but I can speculate a little bit. First of all, it's been used. That land has been used for thousands of years. The Appalachians kind of pooped out after just a couple hundred years of farming right in the Appalachians. So I would suspect that simply long-term, a few thousand years of the oak woodlands there can be cultivated to, or sometimes cultivated every few years. But I also think that there I don't know, I don't want to talk about it, because I know what you mean and I think that's true, and I don't know whether it's a natural phenomenon or something that developed over time.

Now California, you know, you've got a land that wasn't cultivated at the time of colonization, except in some smaller areas. There was no huge amount of cultivation, especially through the Mediterranean regions, but I wouldn't characterize it. So there's a reason why soils might be better, at least at the time of contact, just on that basis. I mean, the Central Valley, where we do our farming, is huge. It was sort of a lot of it was wetlands, and thousands of years of soils being deposited down there from all the rivers running into the Central Valley has to have helped soil quality, but it also California. It's hard to characterize the soils of California and the best way I can think of to characterize them, if you're looking at the whole state, is diverse.

Andy:

Sure.

Dr. Lynn Huntsinger:

There are a lot of different kinds.

Andy:

Sure, and I'll clarify that. I meant, specifically, the places we were comparing in California with that Mediterranean climate.

Dr. Lynn Huntsinger:

Okay, yeah, well, the Central Valley is a Mediterranean climate, but it's, you know, and so that valuable, rich soil, based on all those alluvial deposits and time and everything else, that's mostly used for farming because it is that way. In the foothills, where the oak woodlands are, it's not so great; they're often shallow. There's a lot of endemic soil, like serpentine, that is hostile to non-native plants, and that's our best refugia for native plants because endemic soils take endemic species to grow on them, so our native plants tend to cluster in these serpentine refugia.

There are other kinds of soils; there are some on Mount Diablo that are red or something, but we have a lot of very poor soils if you want to think of it from an agricultural perspective, very rocky, and that's also because not because the oaks desired to or somehow naturally grew on the worst soils, but because all the good soils have been cultivated and oak woodland's been kind of shoved out of the valley, the remaining ones into the foothills, where soils are quite variable, and on the slopes, and I couldn't characterize those as being good.

Andy:

I'm not a soil scientist, and I just know that in the research, there's talk about the soil organic matter content comparisons that California was, I think. I think it was about double the amount of organic matter compared to the Dehesas.

Dr. Lynn Huntsinger:

Yeah, I completely believe that, and I think that's just first from long, well, from long-term, human use and exploitation of the soil.

Andy:

Yeah, that brings back the beginning of this conversation, when you'd spoken about indigenous people managing the landscape for oaks, similar but also differently than what was happening in Spain or what is continuing to happen in Spain. I don't know if you could speak any further on some of those practices.

Dr. Lynn Huntsinger:

Well, one thing we do know is that not a lot of tillage. Tillage really damages the soil and it releases a lot of carbon. I mean agricultural soils, because of tillage, release a lot of greenhouse gas and also because they're fertilized with, of course, nitrogen fertilizers and so on, there's a lot of nitrous oxide that gets released. So, neither native Californians nor ranchers do much tillage, and I think that that has, in a sense, protected the soil. So that would be my theory.

Andy:

Okay.

Dr. Lynn Huntsinger:

There is a lot of burning. Native Americans, really a lot of Native Californians, use fire. That influences nutrient cycling. I suppose those would go back into the soil.

Andy:

You know, one of the things that's interesting about Spain is the low volume of animals that they actually put in pasture, their stocking rates. Just, you know, I think they're talking in that book the number, I think, is one pig per every two acres, or something along those lines, which is, you know, fairly sparse. I mean, given the climate, I guess it makes sense.

Dr. Lynn Huntsinger:

Well, the pigs live off of acorns, sure, and is that an annual stocking rate? Do you think? If it's an annual stocking rate, it's actually not that sparse because the pigs would only be there for a short period of time. As far as I know, because you graze other animals, their primary food is not usually grass, although they do.

I mean, they eat bulbs and the grass our wild pigs in California make. I mean, I wonder what the stocking rate of wild pigs in California is. We have so many. We have a 375-day-a-year hunting season for pigs. I believe we have so many.

They're kind of limited by the number of acorns that fall and that are left on the ground and that can be variable from place to place. I suppose they prune the trees to maximize acorn production. But the ham in Spain has a very unique kind of ham, and if you go to the market, they're selling these legs of ham, and they're priced according to how much of the diet is acorns. So the highest price is for the native black pig that's been fattened on acorns. And it's fattened because acorns fall in the fall, and they're not out there all year around. Everything eats them pretty assiduously. So the pigs get out there in the fall and eat the acorns.

One interesting thing is I was talking to a Dehesa landowner, and we were looking at his pigs, and I said what canopy cover do you manage your woodlands for? And he said well, if I'm primarily raising pigs, then I manage for about 70% canopy cover, but in the areas that I manage for cattle, I want about 30 to 40% canopy cover. So there's an interaction between also, whether they're raising, you know, they see the most value in the pigs or in the cattle or in a mix. So it is really a human-created landscape. So saying one's stocking rate is higher than the other is hard. It's hard to compare.

Also, in California and Spain, they have a lot of other animals that eat acorns, so there would be a bit of competition. I recently gathered a huge amount of acorns, and I found them in a place that was so fenced that deer couldn't get in, and there were tons more than I'd ever seen. And it's just because of that exclusion, and there weren't rodents either. Rodents eat a lot of them. There's a lot of competition for the acorns, and also, we don't have the same premium ham market here. Yeah, they do there. So there's not much motivation for people here to graze pigs.

Andy:

Yeah, we had talked a little while ago about the importance of spacing the oaks because of accessing the water that's available and how the oaks that are still in California are primarily focused around those water resources are still in California are primarily focused around those water resources.

Dr. Lynn Huntsinger:

As you go north, things are less desperate for water. So it's probably completely different in the north than in the south, where things are going to be closer to water.

Andy:

I was going to ask if you think, first, if you think that's because of climate change and, second, how this relates to a lot of things like almond farming and things like that that are going on in California. If you think that's impacting, like, the water access because of so many deep-rooted trees.

Dr. Lynn Huntsinger:

Well, I don't know how deep-rooted almonds are. They're usually, though I'll talk about that second, the oaks are older than climate change, and those patterns of oaks are older than climate change. So no, in terms of the almonds, I mean, they irrigate them. So the big problem with the almonds is they pump at groundwater, and they're taking a lot. As I understand it, as I've heard, a lot of almond groves are coming out because the groundwater problem is so acute in California right now. I mean, we've had places where the soil has dropped 10 feet because the water was pumped during that long drought we had, and the soil isn't supported anymore.

So there are new groundwater regulations, I think, that make it harder to convert grazing land or woodland to almonds. So it's a more direct form of using up the water than just the roots, and the oaks are not irrigated, so I don't see them as contributing. The places where we're feeling those really bad groundwater issues are, by and large, used for crops.

I do worry. Last time I was in Spain, I read an article about the trade-off between carbon and water. So if you started planting a lot of woody vegetation in oak woodlands, including more oaks, you're going to see more competition for water, for sure, and maybe less water. The oak woodlands, including more oaks you're going to see more competition for water, for sure, and maybe less water. The oak woodlands I mean almost all of the water, the fresh water we consume in California runs through an oak woodland at some point. So having a huge amount of water consumed in those woodlands is not necessarily desirable, but I don't think that that amount has changed in the oak woodlands. That's my opinion, but it would if there was a lot of planting, I suppose. Interesting topic for research.

Andy:

Yeah, I'm always like thinking about, like, I'm a big proponent of, like, silvopasture and its appropriateness, and especially drier climates is an interesting conversation because they do a lot to stop water runoff, but at the same time, they use more water. So I guess like, thinking about the bigger picture of whether it is a net positive or net negative to incorporate trees into some of those drier climates, and that's probably a very complicated conversation, more so than a yes or a no.

Dr. Lynn Huntsinger:

Yeah, all good ecological things depend.

But the equivalents are set up for silvopasture. I mean, that's what they have in Spain. The Dehesa has silviculture, and it has pasture, but it also has agro-silvopasturalism, I guess that's what they call it. It also has some crop production. Every 10 years or so, they have to clear out the woody vegetation, and they usually cultivate when they do that. So the Oakwoods in California are pretty easily used for silvopasture, but again, that's for silvopasture. You're not going to increase the tree density too much because then you'll lose your forage, so I don't see it as an incompatible use. So I worry about woodlots and eucalyptus plantations and those kinds of things more than silvopasture, I think is a good idea because of the fact that they're sharing water. The forage crop and the tree crop are actually using water more efficiently in the soil profile, and they're fairly widely spaced.

Right now, the main preoccupation I have is with fire, and those work pretty well to create; they can work pretty well to create more fire-resistant landscapes, which we need pretty badly here. Just can't take any more of this pounding that we're getting from fire, so unbelievable, and I don't think it's going to be a unique problem in the West if we don't do more of the management you were talking about. So agriculture can be a good partner, you know, with forest management and tree management in terms of protecting from fire. I wish we used it more in the mountains, too, because I did my dissertation on using livestock to manage competing shrubs and forests when they were regrowing. That was very effective and that would also be very effective in reducing fuels and crowding. Now, one limitation of grazing I think the same probably applies to prescribed fire, though, if you think about it, which is our other favorite tool, is that you can cut back the seedlings that you may need for regeneration.

Andy:

And that's a problem in Spain, right?

Dr. Lynn Huntsinger:

Yeah, it is. Yeah. Here, probably the biggest problem is deer. Deer love oaks, but livestock do, too, and so there are various management techniques we can use to prevent that.

Andy:

My sheep are big fans.

Dr. Lynn Huntsinger:

Yeah, yeah, sheep. I had goats for a while, my God.

Andy:

They'll eat anything.

Dr. Lynn Huntsinger:

Oaks are their number one priority. I think, anyway, they're not dumb. Oaks are like their number one priority, I think, anyway, they're not dumb. Anyway, I was shocked by that. But in Spain, it's high value enough that they can use little cages to protect the oaks. Once they get above a certain level, they're fine. In California, we have so much land we're not managing at that intensity, so we do that in some places. But I've seen people put when they clear brush and they pile it around the young oaks so that the oaks grow up through the brush and deer and cattle are less likely to get to them.

Andy:

That's a good idea.

Dr. Lynn Huntsinger:

Yeah, in terms of cattle, if your main problem is cattle, they tend to prey on the oaks most when all the grass is dry, so you can cycle them out of oak woodlands during the summer season. You can also do long rotations where you're grazing in one area for years, and then you cycle them back over to another area, and then that time, the young oaks have gotten big enough. Interestingly enough, I don't know if this is in the book or not. Those little seedlings of some species, anyway, will live as seedlings, being cut off every year for a decade, for a decade at least.

And we have an example in our backyard. We planted, of all things, a cork oak in our backyard, and we fenced it so intensively with wire fencing you wouldn't believe how secure it was because, at the time, we had goats, and they were after it. The goats didn't get it. It got to be about six feet tall, maybe eight feet tall, and then a gopher went in, and we had these roots protected too, you know. A gopher went in through the fence and girdled it and killed it dead. It just turned brown and died just like that because they ate the bark off all around the bottom.

There's also a bunch of pests, you know, insects; I don't want to say pests, but insects that don't do what we want them to do, you know, including diseases, some of them from out of the country, that kills oaks too. But anyway, that thing disappeared, and I guess I should look up how long ago that was. But we haven't had goats for at least 10 years, you know. So it's 10 or 15 years, and the thing came back last year, I know, can you believe that? So I've protected it this time with hardware cloth that gophers can't go through, and it's still got the safe, the soil protection, and the thing is now six feet tall again. It grew really fast.

Andy:

So yeah, that coppice they'll, they'll shoot right up once they have that root structure.

Dr. Lynn Huntsinger:

Yeah, and after all that year, those years of coming up and growing roots and coming up and growing roots, I suppose I had a pretty good root structure. I have to admit that I grow my vegetables in stock tanks and they have a drain at the bottom for the water excess water to go out. Because we have so many gophers and I'm not that keen on spending, I find it very frustrating. I don't think there's any way to effectively eliminate them because we live on an oak woodland, we live near an oak woodland. The stock tanks have these holes at the bottom, and you can put a hose in there. So, on one of them, I just put a hose in there and ran it down to this little Oak so that it gets the drainage from my stock tank. So I don't directly irrigate it, but it gets the drainage from the stock tank. So, and I don't know, it probably doesn't need it anymore, but I wanted to see it. When I saw it coming up, I thought it was amazing.

Andy:

You've invested too much in it. You can't let it die now.

Dr. Lynn Huntsinger:

We'll see. Anyway, so getting oaks, I have a friend again. Mitch McLaren did his dissertation on the regeneration of oaks, and he said everything eats oaks. The real mystery is how they survive, and that's what we need to know more about: how to help them survive.

Yeah, that's kind of the approach we take here in Spain. They've done a lot of reforestation with oaks and protected them. Yeah, their problem is just the same problem we have here: the income is very low, and there's competition for that land, for vineyards, and for housing. It's a beautiful country, and that's the real crisis that our woodlands face in California and in Spain. Yeah, plus intensification.

Andy:

Yeah, which I think brings me to my biggest concern about oaks is climate change. So, like with all the knowledge that you've developed on this type of stuff around this silvopastoral type system, specifically around oaks, you know, if you could wave a wand and say this is what I would like to see realistically, I guess, what would be the best solution to our current crisis, both for the water, climate change, keeping species alive so that they can migrate fast enough for what's coming. Just a small question.

Dr. Lynn Huntsinger:

Well, first, a good idea would be to give them back to native Californians. That would be my ideal solution, and we actually are trying to do a lot more collaborative management with native Californians because of traditional practices and that's one way to try to restore some of their resilience. But none of us have experienced climate change right before.

So there's all in front of all of us is kind of a mystery about what to do. There's a paper I think Connie Millar and a bunch of other people about forests and migrating forests, and it's about letting. First of all, we could expand oak woodlands by converting some of our lower elevation conifer forests to more oaks because oaks are more climate change-resistant in a lot of areas, and so this paper basically explained that species are going to have to move higher.

Andy:

I might've actually read that.

Dr. Lynn Huntsinger:

We could expand oak woodlands if we had the will and the willingness to do hands-on management, as you alluded to first. I see that as the biggest crisis of all: the lack of political will to take responsibility for hands-on management. You know you made a mistake. People sue you. It's easier to do nothing. You know, yeah, ranchers still do it.

Of course, it's their land, private land, no problem. But even they could be facing regulations that'll make it harder. I hope not, but probably we're going to see some migration. Maybe we have to do assisted migration of species from lower to higher and north to, I mean, south to north. So we have oaks all up and down California, from the driest parts to the wettest parts. Maybe we'll see more, and direct efforts are just spreading acorns around. It's not hard to plant an oak; mine help.

What'll happen in the very south? We don't know, right? We don't know whether we'll have more rainfall in a specific spot. We don't know whether we'll have more rainfall or less. But even if we have more rainfall, how will that interact with temperatures, which makes rainfall less effective? We don't know that much about that. I say we, but I mean me, and so it's not quite clear. But that would be the obvious. Things would be things from lower rainfall areas would move north. And then what happens at the very southernmost end? I'm not sure. We have a research project right now, Jim Bartolome and I, looking at management in the Southland down near the Mexican border. So we'll see.

Andy:

Yeah, that sounds interesting.

Dr. Lynn Huntsinger:

Yeah, it is interesting. It's not necessarily about oaks, but there are oak woodlands there, and maybe we'll learn something about managing them. Yeah, you know, a drought, and don't get me wrong, we've had some pretty bad droughts. But there's such a thing as what we call a range drought and a people drought. People's droughts require a lot of snow in the Sierra and enough of that plus rainfall to fill the reservoirs so that we can pump that water for irrigation and for the cities. Right, yeah, we need places to save it and store it.

Range drought is a little different. It's has rain been falling at regular intervals or decent intervals through the winter. It's not so much. Once you've saturated the soil, you don't need much rain to keep the green stuff growing. So, like the last three days, we've had three more, probably more than three inches here, but probably the first inch was enough for the range. The rest is going to just run off, maybe even the first half an inch. So sprinkles and regular sprinkles are kind of the. When you don't have those, when you have a summer or a winter, when there's no, when the rain just doesn't fall for a long period of time, that's a range drought, and we did have that, and we have had it. And when it doesn't fall at the right time, it's a range drought, whereas, for urban areas, it doesn't matter too much when it falls as long as there's a place to store it. For the range, we need sort of some rain.

Now, we went down to the Southland for our research project there, and it rained. You remember I don't know, you're probably, I doubt you were in California at the time, but we had a huge rainfall in October, I believe, and usually early. It's been falling, coming later and later. It's supposed to fall in October and November, but it doesn't always listen to us. But this year started in October, and so much rain fell it was really a lot. But even down in San Diego, tremendous grass growth started up in our research area and some other things, some more drought-resistant broad leaves like what we call filler, and started up, and that was great. Everybody thought this was great.

But the rancher said well, if it doesn't keep up, I will never have as much forage capacity as I would if it had started later and kept up. Because it is true, a lot of that grass has died now. Before this latest rainfall, a lot of it just flat-out died. This rainfall will perk up whatever's left, but it won't be the grasses so much that started out. They germinated, so the germination pool has been reduced. So we'll see. We'll see how productive it is in the end, but we don't know. The other observation which I thought was fascinating by a rancher in this area was one year we had a lot of rain in the spring, which is prime growing time, when temperatures warm and the soil's wet, you get a lot of growth. And he said I said you must have so much grass. And he said no, it's not that great, because it's been so dark which I never thought about that If it's cloudy, constantly cloudy, the grass doesn't like it either. You need rain and sunshine.

Andy:

Yeah, now, because of the delicateness of the grasses, do you think there should be a coordinated effort to bring in other species, maybe native species that had previously occupied those spaces, or maybe other species from places with similar climates that can handle that extreme weather pattern?

Dr. Lynn Huntsinger:

Well, both those things are here and abundant in California. There's no need to bring in anything. I mean, the fact is, no grass can grow without water, so it doesn't matter if there's no water. The only way you can make more grass grow is irrigation, and of course we don't want to see an increase in irrigation. And when we do irrigate, we should irrigate our highest-value crops, right?

It doesn't matter, native, non-native, away from the coast, the coast is different because it's wetter in the summer, but away from the coast, the natives, they're not active in the summer, they go dormant, and they don't die, they don't die, which makes them more vulnerable actually than the non-natives, the non-natives don't die either no no, they're annuals, so they're living through the summer as seeds gotcha someone pointed that out to me one-time living seeds throughout the soil.

Those things pop up, and they outgrow the natives.

They get tall; they're more flexible. So, first of all, you can't kill them with a drought. You can kill a native perennial with a drought. You can't kill them with plowing. You can't kill them with. You can't kill them with plowing. You can't kill them with grazing. You can't kill them with prescribed burning. You can't kill the non-natives.

There are 10 years of seeds at least in the soil. So even if you destroyed all the germination one year, there would still be seeds left for the next year, and they produce abundant seeds, way more seeds than our natives, and they come up, and they're competitive right from the beginning. So every year in my class, we grow natives and non-natives with Stipa pulchra and Avena fatua for the grass fans. They're under ideal conditions in the greenhouse, and the Avenas are at least three times larger than the Stipas after 12 weeks.

Now you make a good point. The Stipas are there. They often can turn green faster. They also germinate faster than the stipas after 12 weeks. Now, you make a good point. The stipas are there. They often can green, turn green faster. They also germinate faster than the Avenus. But they'll green up faster because they don't have to grow roots, but the annuals, they catch up. They'll never have as many or as deep roots as the non-natives, probably as far as we know, but they make up for it by just being hugely productive.

So one of our management issues in California is not bringing in new plants because that's not going to work. We've got the toughest grasses, and throughout any place, there hasn't been tillage. The natives are still there. They're just kind of buried, but they're still there when they, oh, I lost track of what I was saying, but they are still there when they. Uh, no, I lost track of what I was saying, but they are still there. No, our biggest management challenge, and one that we can handle First of all, we can't do anything about rain. Yeah, that's the biggest control.

Andy:

Yeah, and that's that's like the big problem. Like otherwise, I wouldn't. That's bringing me back to that. What I was saying about like climate change, like as much as you had mentioned, like giving the land back to the native Californians. Because of climate change, we can't just turn back the clock in terms of land management, but that doesn't mean we can't take a lot of those ideas and let you know they have a utility, they have a significant utility.

Dr. Lynn Huntsinger:

I think that native Californians would at least manage the land, and I don't think that's happening on a lot of our land. I would agree.

I'm in favor of it. And yes, as I said, it's new to everybody, right? Yeah, climate change is new to everybody. We can take lessons from places further south or drier climates in California and see, you know, and seeds, and you know all of that, acorns and so on, but it's all-new, all of that acorns and so on, but it's all new. Flexibility is the name of the game. And I tell you what, the annual grasses are incredibly flexible, and we now think that the Central Valley was not necessarily much of a grassland. It was broadly huge.

I mean, there's a beautiful piece by John Muir about the bee gardens of the Central Valley, just huge amounts of flowering plants, because it was so droughty that it's not clear that the perennials, you know. Even today, you find them much more commonly either in the up, at the higher elevations, or near the coast where it's wetter. I have them in my backyard, speaking of an area that's not only had to fill dumped on it and a house built on it, but goats also overgrazed it for a decade, for a decade, and there's still the stipas growing patches that seem to increase sometimes, I think, sometimes you think they're increasing more than they are because during a drought they stand out because they're still there and the annuals hardly grow. I don't know. I'd have to start measuring them more rigorously, but they're doing fine. I collect the seeds for the experiment every year from my backyard, so they also do pretty well. Their, a Stiplepulchra, is pretty adapted to most kinds of disturbance, so they do well.

But anyway, yes, the dominant grasses in California today came from Mediterranean Europe. The dominant grasses in California today come from Mediterranean Europe, some from Australia, some from Chile, some from a few other little Mediterranean Australia, and a few other little Mediterranean regions around the world, and they're a biodiversity hotspot. Many, many species, very diverse of all kinds, very diverse of all kinds. So, the problem is sheer biomass. Our wildlife, in particular, is not adapted to that much growth, so we use grazing and fire to try to create more biodiversity-positive environments by simply removing that biomass and allowing a lot of the natives, like vernal pools.

They have these beautiful rings of flowers that come about around, and grazing, in particular, is incredibly useful because the cows eat the non-native grasses first. They're taller, they like them, they don't really like to eat little flowers. But the other thing that's interesting is you reduce those and the smaller plants. There are some videos on this on YouTube by a preserve manager. The smaller flowers get access to the sun and can grow better, but because you've taken the annuals not only out of the rim but out of the pool, they will grow into a pond and choke it. Because you've done that, the water lasts longer, and more of the native little shrimps and amphibians succeed in their breeding because their success really depends on how much rainfall there is and how long it stays in these spring pools.

Andy:

Oh, wow, yeah, that's awesome. A microcosm, I guess, of like a lot of the ecosystem things that we don't think about when we think about invasives. You can see it in one little vernal pool.

Dr. Lynn Huntsinger:

Yeah, and I don't think that on a lot of California grassland we're going to restore native prairie. There is some on the coast. The coast is wetter and more resilient, but in our drier areas, I know preserve people that have spent tens of thousands of dollars on herbicides, soil removal, all kinds of stuff trying to get rid of the annuals and restore natives, and it may last a year or two, but without constant weeding those plants are tough. We range managers, of course, for a hundred years have said, oh well, okay, but we have, you know, new people getting really involved, and I think it's wonderful that they care about the grassland and love it. And we've learned a lot from people about conservation and the values, the biodiversity values. But it's very hard to, it's very hard to say to them that's not coming back. Now, one thing that is good is I mentioned all those weird soils in California. There are other things that we don't understand that seem to influence where you still have dominance of native perennials.

I drive home on this urban street. There's one spot. One spot it's beneath a park and some tennis courts. It just goes right down to the boulevard. There's some oaks, there's oak woodland, everywhere here. It's a solid native perennial. It's just a bit of grass on his land. And I've been watching it this year because I just noticed it, because it's so incredibly native perennial dominated, and taking pictures of it and how it changes.

Because early when it first germinated, when the first rainfall fell, the stipa greened up right away, and then there was nothing between it; it was just stipa and dirt, and then other things started growing up. There's some soap root, which is another native species, and I need to go back and identify the other ones that were coming up between the bunches because I think it's fascinating. But those kinds of areas, if you can find areas like my backyard where there's still some stipa and places like that, and you expand those areas and manage them favorably for the grasses, that's the way to go If you want to restore native perennials rather than trying to restore land that's been tilled before or that's so droughty and is such good soil. The more fertile the soil is, the harder it is to restore the natives. Fertile the soil is, the harder it is to restore the natives.

There's a paper by a guy named Stuart Weiss about an endangered butterfly that was lost at the Jepson Preserve in Stanford. it's called the Bay Checker Spot Butterfly, and it depends on flowers. there was a serpentine site that had a lot of flowers on it along Freeway 101. And deposition of nitrogen from car exhaust was overcoming sort of the natural hospitality of serpentine sites by adding nitrogen, and they were losing the pollinators and if you look and the flowers, because the flowers are native and they can't compete with these annuals and they were being covered by this non-native grass they were losing that and losing the butterfly as a result. And some they did.

All the studies on the preserve at Stanford, you can look up the history, and there's paper after paper about how climate change is causing this butterfly to disappear. Oh, it's finally gone, and a historian started working at Stanford and studied it and realized they disappeared shortly after they removed grazing from the preserve because grazing removed the grass that was choking out the flowers.

So this sounds apocryphal. We just wrote a paper on it called Grazing and Management of Imperiled Species. If anybody wants it, I think it's in sustainability. But what I'm saying is you look for bad soil, low-fertility soil, and places where style already grows, and you can maybe do some good there, expanding the style, making sure it stays healthy, and doing management that keeps it from being overcome by the annuals. That's that. That's where I would start.

Andy:

It's a sliver of hope.

Dr. Lynn Huntsinger:

It's a sliver of hope.

Andy:

Lynn, for folks who have enjoyed this conversation, do you have a link to some of your work, some of the stuff that you're working on, or something that you would like to highlight for folks who want to learn more about this?

Dr. Lynn Huntsinger:

Well, I think we have two papers that my students did. I did with my students that came out, One by Sheila Berry and one by Nick Buckley Buckley Biggs. She got married a long time ago, but anyway, they're both really interesting papers, really timely. One is about grazing an endangered species, and Sheila went through all the endangered species literature put out by Fish and Wildlife Service I think it was a state Fish and Wildlife and what the documentation was, and then kept track which? Where is grazing positive? Where is grazing negative? Where is it both, depending on the situation?

In a lot of cases, it's just not known. It's presumed guilty until found innocent. In general, but yeah, there's a substantial number of endangered species that really benefit from grazing. So that's kind of an interesting paper. The book, of course, for this topic is my favorite that you mentioned already. And then Nick and I did a paper about grazing and if there's a way to manage grazing to increase carbon sequestration.

Andy:

Awesome.

Dr. Lynn Huntsinger:

And our conclusion is there's no data for California. There's data for other places. One of my other students showed you can enhance carbon sequestration in the Midwest pastures, but they're so different because carbon sequestration is controlled in California a lot by rain. So, probably based on this other paper that I saw, the best way to increase I mean grazing is neutral as far as we know in all the data that we have. But OK, so the best thing is probably to have oaks Silvopasture, as you said, for carbon sequestration, fire-resistant storage, and for grasslands, just protecting the soil and not letting the carbon get lost by erosion. That's what we do until somebody shows differently. That's where we're at.

Andy:

This is has been a really interesting conversation.

Dr. Lynn Huntsinger:

One thing is that I do have a website, so they can just Google my website, which lists all my papers. It's my Berkeley website. That links to another website, but the publications are on the Berkeley website, so just Lynn Hunsinger. I think if you just Google Lynn Hunsinger, you'll just write my name, and you'll get it.

Thank you, Andy. This has been really fun, and I hope people enjoy it.

To listen to this interview, tune into episode #81 of the Poor Proles Almanac.